Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Things that make me stabby

I heard a word the other day that immediately pushed me past the point of sensible reaction, and into the realm of wanting to pull somebody's eyeballs out through their rectal cavity. That might sound like an overreaction, but bear with me.

"Staycation"

The word is billed as a combination of "stay" and "vacation" implying that you're taking a vacation and staying in one place, but in fact is neither word. The biggest problem I have with words like this, which according to the Wikipedia entry are called a portmanteau is that they're not particularly clever and have a strong tendency to be used to imply that the person using them is.

A fine example of this at work is the suffix "-gate" applied to anything that the breathless press claims is the latest Really Big Scandal. (If you're like me and can't stand this phenomenon, for God's sake don't go here.) When did it become okay to take two perfectly good, and often descriptive, words and mash them together? You can't come up with a word or phrase that adequately describes what you're talking about, so you have to make one up? For God's sake, the latest copy of my Webster's Dictionary is four inches thick. In all of that, there simply must already be the perfect word you need....and if not, we're speaking English! Borrow a word from another language if you have to.

Quit making bastardized, incomprehensible amalgamations and use English like everybody else, or I may have to sic the Grammar Nazi on you.

1 comment:

lattégirl said...

A similar, not-so-new trend in mashing words together is the mashing of celebrity (couple) names together. I don't think I need to supply any examples. It makes me feel slightly nauseated each time the star-gazing media come up with a new one.