General linguistic snark

[unixronin]

Triggered by no less than three posts I've just seen in communities I read:  If you're trying to sound clever and erudite, you won't achieve it by trying to use fancy foreign words that you can neither spell nor pronounce.  It just makes you sound and look like a pretentious ignoramus.  The word you mean when you type "Wa la", for example, is spelled "Voila", and it isn't pronounced the way either of those looks to a non-French-speaker.  The same applies to "Boo coo" and "Beaucoup".

I don't have the energy right now to dig out the rest.

Comments

[motomuffin.livejournal.com]

That's too funny!

I generally use "Vi-Ola." Violas are funnier than, say, Cellos, and both are funnier than spelling it "Wah-La" (I've never seen that -- I would hope they're doing it on purpose? trying to be funny?).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The people I've seen do this seem to seriously think that, well, that's more or less how it sounds, so that's how it must be spelled.

(Amusingly enough, this is invariably native English speakers, and English is probably one of the more dangerous languages in which to make such assumptions -- ploughing roughly through is enough to make you cough, even though you have a dictionary.)

Too true!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

Sometimes they type "Walla". I always wish they'd use a turbanned Sikh for an icon with that one.

Re: Too true!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

You're saying the repeated misspelling makes you Sikh? :)

Re: Too true!

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

*dies laughing*

-Ogre

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

ty 4 that.

don't u h8 the laziness of peeps that post like this?

[nephthys510.livejournal.com]

mercy buckets.

[plutosonium.livejournal.com]

That kind of thing drives me nuts too. I have also run into a few people misapplying common sayings. They'd misinterpret what they represented (say, something about driving would mean golf to them, as opposed to cars.) I wish I could remember a good example. Mostly I remember that it drove me bugfuck.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of Scott Adams' many comments on managers utterly mangling established proverbs and having no idea that what they just said didn't make any sense.

[plutosonium.livejournal.com]

My mom is prone to that. *sigh*

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

And then there's "irregardless"....

[mazianni.livejournal.com]

irregardless is in the dictionary. Yes, I know, that doesn't make it right. ;-)


I had a prof for a college writing class, he used to edit grammar books for a living. His three favorite rants included what an idiot President Bush is, how nobody seemed to be teaching grammar anymore, and how people tried to sound erudite by saying things like "usage" instead of "use." He admonished us to use simple words in our essays and to make damn sure we knew what they meant.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*sigh* and the thing of it is, the entire web is at their fingertips. If I don't know for sure, I Wiki it up (I'm beginning to try to steer clear of Google when I can); if I can't find it, I don't use it. Yeah, it means sometimes I get shinied off on a merry web chase mid-post... but it means when I finally do hit "send" it's usually *right*... not always... but a lot more often than I see in the wild.