Silly Saturday

By Capt. Fogg

OK, call it silly Saturday, but they're all the same, all silly and it's a shame. 

Went to the grocery store and grabbed a package of the yogurt covered cranberries my wife likes and what do you know?  They're now Greek yogurt covered cranberries although they taste exactly the same. The revolution is over.  There's no more non-Hellenic yogurt to be had anywhere in any form.  Active, inactive, fruit on the bottom or no fruit at all, it's all Greek, all the time and forever. Another win for commercial groupspeak.  Opa!

The way we talk!  I've never heard it before but in the last few days, I'm hearing "in the wheelhouse" over and over.  Sometimes it's my wheelhouse or your wheelhouse and as far as I can tell it might mean what "in the ballpark" meant last week, or perhaps it still does -- who knows?  Not me. Anyway, my boat has a wheelhouse but I'm not in it.  Too damn hot today and  by the way God Damn it, it's not genius whatever it is - nothing is genius, it's a damned noun, not an adverb!  Is that in your twerking wheelhouse brah?


So whatever else might be trending today amongst the low word count, #instaenglish set, keep it to yourself. I've had enough, go put it in your hashtag and smoke it or shove it up your shark and jump it. I don't need a reminder of how nothing makes any sense and how much you like it that way

Deep tweets

Posted for our cherished Capt. Fogg and the pedant in all of us.

@CarrieRickey @LanceMannion pic.twitter.com/50sJQkq5mw
— Rob Patterson (@BfloHealthAtty) February 26, 2014

Hey You! Shut up!

Yes, you. 


By Capt. Fogg

It's the time of year at which I start to bitch and moan more than usual about what you have been doing to my language in that pathetically  passionate and Sisyphean pursuit of  being like the cool kids, the hip, with-it, urban, hang around the mall texting, thug pretending Clearasil crowd you wish you were like instead of the afraid-to-grow-up nerd with the 6000 word vocabulary you are.   Don't take comfort in the idea that I'm the only one.  I have allies.

Lake Superior State University may be seeking status by publishing their annual list of banned words.  I admit I would never have heard of them otherwise, but standing up for human dignity, taking a risk or even sticking their necks out (which is a cliche on my own banned list ) is easier for the little guy than for the English Department at Yale or Princeton or Harvard who have so much jargon laden linguistic naughtiness of their own to hide. I mean listen to those people some time.

It's to be noted that the Oxford dictionary folks have given us "selfie" as the word of the year, as though the nickname, the childish contraction, the conveyor of infantile cuteness makes the useless word preferable to 'self portrait' or simply 'picture' and as though we've made a statement  as important, as piquant, as precious as wearing your hat backwards some 40 years after the cuteness and uniqueness turned rancid.  Like most of this pretentious pre-teen babble, it says, "I'm not a stodgy grown up, I'm a kid, a street urchin, a rebel."   The hell you are.

No wonder then that  LSSU puts 'selfie' at the top of the annual banned list and suggests that we all teach by example and not use it no matter how much the idiot press tries to gain favor from the never-grow-ups.  It doesn't make you younger and  more charming than covering your encroaching baldness by wearing a hat in a restaurant or running shoes with a business suit.

Sure, many or maybe most people will giggle at the list and perhaps snicker about the rural pretentiousness  of  some college housed in some igloo somewhere on the frigid shores of Lake Superior and offers majors in  Fisheries and Wildlife Management, but they're heroes to me. Back when I was riding about alone with a lance and tin pot helmet like trying to like get people to like not say like so much it was encouraging to have them out there with me, not that anything ever retards the advance of  acid dripping aliens or drooling Americans yearning to be hip.  But you do what you have to do. You make a point of  ignoring the latest media infatuation, the latest gleeful descent into ever more nearly transcendental  vulgarity like  that culture destroying practice of  waving one's genitals in the public face like a blue-assed baboon in heat or a moose in rut: twerking. It's on their list and mine, targeted for destruction.


It's equally as encouraging to have LSSU riding at my side when approaching that  overripe, fly-blown and stinking cliche that has has anything larger than common as "on steroids."   Perhaps we should start the rumor that saying "on steroids" does the same thing to your genitals as actually being on steroids.  Maybe untrue, but anything for the cause. 

But there's a gorilla in the room, to pick another beaten to death trope, and although this year's list doesn't mention it, it may be the most vile, most overused, most needful of a quick and merciful death and it's "awesome."   There must be some psychological principle involved but most of us don't notice that you can't get through a dozen words without one of them being Awesome.  You can't say it without a certain smile, inflection, gesture or bit of micro-theater -- everything from relieving your bladder to the contemplation of the cosmos is just Awesome!  Didja hear that smile in my voice? Ain't I childlike and cute?  I just hope the next time something seems just 'Ahhhhsome' that you choke on it and don't expect no stinking Heimlich from me or my buddy on the donkey here: LSSU the fighting Lakers.

And then there's "urban."  That accursed term which no longer has much to do with metropolitan life. We have definitions and we have "urban" definitions. We have an "urban" dictionary which serves to give some ersatz dignity to any ignorant patois and attempts to explain those great linguistic questions of the difference between big and big ass and all the strange agglutinative properties of  affixes like ass.   Indeed "urban" stands for a subculture and the language it uses.  I have only one thing to say about it: don't.  By the time it gets into the Urban Dictionary it's too damn late and probably inaccurate at that.  That makes you a follower, a  loser a poseur. 

So look, if you really speak English, if you enjoy novel and creative usage and know something about the history of the words you're building something out of, go ahead.  It's how language progresses, it's where poetry and literature begin, but if you use it to cover up ignorance or even to promote it, if everything is awesome only because it's all you know. you're on the list bud. You're got me and the LSSU Lakers on your trail and they're not just bad-ass, they're awesome and might just do something impactful, if you know what  I mean.

This one is for Capt. Fogg

I may just quit blogging after reading this about incendiary blog posts. This guy and his commenters may have truly won the internets forever. It's pitch perfect. Think our own Sultan of Syntax, Fogg, will enjoy it.

Via watertiger who always has a bunch of fun stuff every single day.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

Proactively efforting to impact the thought showers.

By Capt. Fogg

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

-George Orwell-

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to award the Human Voices Doctor Syntax award to Simon Milton.

"Why do we have to have 'coterminous, stakeholder engagement' when we could just 'talk to people' instead?"

said the Chairman of The Local Government Association, an organization that represents local government officials in England and Wales. I love this guy.

Pretentious and impenetrable babble has metastasized into every English speaking part of the world like verbal melanoma; from business schools, PR firms, popular science TV shows and journalistic covens, and it's a rare writer or speaker who doesn't effort try to include as many copies of "empowerment, " "proactive" and "Impactful" in every sentence he excretes.

Why does anyone need a clumsy, worn out metaphor like "negatively impacted on" when hurt or harmed will do so much better? Of course our institutionalized horror of appearing illiberal by using direct language is responsible for much of it. Careers have been made by those who marshal groups to speak for non-existent "communities" so as to ban words that aren't really offensive to anyone other than graduate students eager to cooperate with professors who need to publish.

Brainstorming, itself a crapulous and unfunny metaphor for talking amongst a group, seemed, or so we were given input told, to be offensive to epileptics even though there is no evidence of it negatively impacting on annoying anyone. Let's call it "thought showering" said one British City Council. Let's not. Let's just call it pretentious babble posing as enlightened vocabulary.

Let us please have a round of applause for Mr. Milton!


Cross posted from Human Voices

Where have all the mothers gone?

By Capt. Fogg

This being my first Mother's day without having a mother, I tend to notice all the hoopla from the people selling things, from flowers to Caribbean cruises, with a bit of sadness. Of course being a language snob and a grammatical elitist, at least in America where using the language at above the Kindergarten level is like carrying Chairman Mao's little red book, I'm disgusted with the metamorphosis of Mother's Day into "Mom's Day."

"I always wanted to be a Mom" reads today's local newspaper headline. The respect implied by being someone's mother would be too much for down-to-earth, anti-adult Americans. Maybe we should stop saying Mother of God or Mother Theresa or God forbid, Mother Miles and change them all to "Moms."

Isn't it bad enough that we wear backwards caps like the Little Rascals; do we have to talk like toddlers? Grow up.

And while we're on the subject, why the hell not a Grandparent's day? Particularly when the grown children are still being subsidized by said ancestors? Just don't call it Gramps' day or Granny's day. Why? Because I'm a pistol packin' Grandpa and I don't like it, that's why.

*All the above is null and void if you actually are my grandson, of course. In that case you can do no wrong.


Cross posted from Human Voices

Proactively efforting impactful resolutions

By Capt. Fogg

"Will the impact negatively impact Mars? We're efforting more information"
- TV news anchor -

Well, it's another new year and time for those resolutions, but this time it's going to be different. I've had enough with the "lose ten pounds, clean up the garage" nonsense.

So, enter the caped crusader, the masked avenger, the diabolical Doctor Syntax; scourge of the illiterate and the savior of the tongue. No, I'm not the only one that would prefer to have people speak plain English rather than hide their flimsy educations behind meaningless, redundant, inappropriate, misused cliche, jargon and worn out metaphor, but I'm the only one willing to do more than compose lists that only the literate will read. This time it's going to be different. This time I resolve to kill.

• The next person I hear using "efforting" as a verb as in "I'm efforting information" is a dead man. If you are unaware of participles like attempting, trying or even endeavoring, I'm going to make an effort to see how many slugs I can put through you before you hit the ground.
  
• If you insist on using words like "impactful" or "impactify" or think it's cute and witty to continually and relentlessly substitute the stale and mawkishly metaphorical "impact" for effect, I'm going to think it's cute and witty to put a hollow point between your eyes. How's that for proactive impactification, bozo?
• Same goes for those who think "having a negative impact on" sounds more educated than hurt or harmed or damaged. If an impact is a collision, a negative impact must be an explosion - like the one that propels a 9mm slug through your empty skull - impactfuly, of course.
• I don't care what your excuse is, waiting for someone is very different than waiting on someone. Think otherwise? Here, hold these two wires.
• The verb to invite doesn't turn into an invitation by stressing the first syllable, even if you're on Jeff Foxworthy's list. I invite you to have some of this Kool Aid - it's delicious.
• You angry folks who write about "mute" points and use "haft to" and "tow the line" and expect me to take your arguments seriously: I'm not going to, I'm going to kill you instead.
• You upper middle class suburbanites who think it's cute to appropriate stale inner city slang - it's jewelry, not "bling" and the next sound you hear is not going to be bling either - it'll be BANG! Badunkadunk? Sounds like this UZI blowing your head off, now get back in your Lexus and go back to Palm Beach.
• "Could of?" "Try and?" "the reason why I did it?" " The reason was because?" Up against the wall.

You'll have to guess at the rest, I'm not going to help you too much and it will do you good to think twice about your obsession with redundant 1980's academic neologisms and political buzz words, like empowerment and proactive -- or those just plain annoying Deconstructionist affectations like Verisimilitude. Think Kindergarten portmanteau words like "Ginormous" make you sound erudite? Think twice, because I just may be lurking around the corner somewhere. Doctor Syntax is listening to you.

Cross posted from Human Voices