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

[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.