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

[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.