Making Up Words Should Require A Degree

Namely English. I’m not $75k in the hole for nothing. If I don’t have a license to make up words then what the hell good is the piece of cardstock with my name on it sitting, I believe, under my bed for the dust bunnies to eat? Like interneters. My Firefox thinks that’s a bad word and has marked with with a red, squiggly line of doom. But me, I like the word interneter. It does to the word internet what blogger does to blog. It personifies it. It makes sense. Instead of saying one who uses a blog, we have a less overwritten term, blogger. So instead of one who uses the internet, web junkie, zit-strewn geek with carpal tunnel or chronic masturbator, we have interneter. Less tongue-tying, less letters, less cumbersome. Interneter. Makes sense. If blogger can exist, so can interneter.

Why do I say making up words requires an English degree? Well who better than to form new and better words than the people already proficient and learned in the language? Makes sense, right? But it looks like this unspoken rule has spread like a vicious rumor to the journalists of the world because, oh damn, they’re making shit up now too. The thing is, they suck at it. Namely because they don’t know the original word it’s spawned from to begin with. Really, what they’re doing is improperly using words that already have a proper saying because they can and because this is the media, people believe everything they say so they’ll think that old words have morphed into new ones because Candy Cane on the News At Nine says it. Oh how mistaken they were.

For instance, this morning I think my degree singed around the edges a little and my student loan debt stuck me in the eye Moe-style when I heard a reporter talk about something or other on the news. I can’t remember what he was talking about, although I think it had something to do with push-ups. Local news, remember.

Anyway, I nearly choked on my toothpaste when said reporter mentioned the passers-byers.

Let me repeat that. Passers-byers.

In other words, people who were passing by. To us normals, that would be passers-by. I’ll repeat that again. Passers-by. Now I can understand the trickiness of this word and people wanting to say passer-bys which is totally understandable but it looked like this reporter had a case of the “ers’s”. Or just couldn’t remember where to put the S so he went for an all or nothing.

This is along the lines of attorneys general. They’re not attorney generals. They are attorneys general. Flipping the S, I can understand. Throwing an S party, I can’t, especially when standard language has a tendency to base itself off of the media. Watch, now, as passers-byers seeps into mainstream American English like words past, such as ones (honestly, you can’t plural one, it automatically becomes two although I am thoroughly guilty of this), texted (do you say ask-ed? lean-ed? ran-ed? do you know how dumb you sound when you say texted? don’t waste the syllable, say text, it works in past tense just fine) and the statement ‘I seen’ (saw, it’s saw, your participles are all wrong).

From now on, lets leave the fucking with the English language to the ones who actually study it. At least we can morph words into seemingly intelligible mutations that make an iota of sense and don’t sound like a lobotomized gorilla trying to paint by numbers. Joe Buckwelder from the News at Ten should just stick to reading off his teleprompter instead of attempting to maneuver the language on his own. It just gets messy when the pyro has the matches.

~ by Donna on May 2, 2008.