The Grammar Vandal

Okay.  Two things:

1) I am sick of people adding the suffix “-gate” to every catastrophe, disaster or scandal: most recently, Spygate (the Patriots spying on other teams or something like that; I detest football, so I’m not following the story) and Bittergate (Barack Obama’s comments on Pennsylvanians feeling bitter with George Bush).

And it becomes even more gauche in other situations.  One that sticks out in particular is Lifestylegate, which happened a few years ago on American Idol when Mandisa prefaced her gospel song with a speech about how your lifestyle shouldn’t hold you back from God, thus alienating her LGBT fans, and she had more gay fans than any other Idol to begin with (she was the big black diva!), so that wasn’t a smart move, and she got eliminated shortly after, but I have a point, I swear!  LIFESTYLEGATE?  No.  Just no.

It was called WATERGATE because that was the name of the building!  Don’t attach -gate to every scandal!

Secondly:

I’m watching the news on Fox right now.  Not Fox News — the local Boston affiliate (mostly because I just finished watching American Idol.  Go Cookie!  Also, the battery in the remote died a few days ago and I’m too lazy to get up and turn the TV off).

Anyway:

The anchor said a sentence along this line: “He admitted his homosexuality a few years ago.”

When I took my first journalism class at Fairfield University, I was taught that you need to be extremely careful with the word admit.  This is because the word denotes guilt.  Because of this, you rarely see the word in the news.

Above all, you must never use the word admit when someone says that he or she is gay.  When you use that word, you imply that being gay is something about which one should be ashamed.  Not only does it perpetuate homophobia, it also shows editorialism on the part of a journalist.

Well, it is Fox.

How can this happen?

Have any of you studied journalism?  What is your opinion on this?

My friend Lisa, a.k.a. the First Year Teacher, went to New York for the weekend.  She’s a grammar stickler in her own right and she took a few pictures of errors that she found.

Check them out:

This particular sign is fantastic for our amusement because the errors are so plentiful!  Which one is worse: the usage of the fake word lite, the hyphen in ice-cream, or the redundancy of diet lite?

Ah, comma, you truly are the ugly stepchild of this sign.  If only you had been a colon, a period or an exclamation point!

Also, I have some very exciting news in my life!  There are a few pieces of news, actually.  I can’t wait to unveil it all next week.

Thanks, Lisa!

Spam!

I’ve been getting so much of it lately.  I never had a problem with spam when I was running this blog through Blogger.

It’s the kind with a bunch of nonsense words typed in the comments and then the Web site is a link to some kind of meds or something.

Any advice, fellow WordPress users?

I’m off to New Mexico for a week, and I am taking a break from absolutely EVERYTHING.  I’ve never had a whole week off from my job (and I’ve been there over a year and a half), so this is extremely overdue.

I will be escaping work, drama and my overscheduled life — and I hope to escape the bronchitis and ear infection that I’ve been fighting off for the past few weeks.  I am exhausted and sick of being sick all the time.

That means that I’m taking a break from the blog as well.  I won’t be posting until I get back, but I will probably be taking plenty of pictures of grammatical errors that I see as I road trip from Albuquerque to Las Cruces and back up to Santa Fe.

Have a great week!

Check out this image that I saw in my college newspaper, the Fairfield Mirror:

It’s not 100% clear, nor is it when you blow it up to twice its size, but I’m pretty sure that that says unapposed.

We all know that the Fairfield Mirror is no stranger to unbelievable errors, even spelling errors in front page headlines on the top of the fold, but I thought they were making more of an effort.  (I was going to link it, but apparently WordPress never uploaded that entry from blogger, so check it out on the Mirror’s Web site.)

Does that look like unopposed or unapposed to you?

When I was still running this blog through Blogger, I started having polls on the site.  Unfortunately, WordPress does not currently have a poll widget for this layout.  (If anyone knows how to do it without creating one’s own layout, please let me know!)

Here is the poll and the final results:

When is the word “thru” okay?

• Always (1 vote — 0%)
• In some circumstances (51 votes — 43%)
• Only if it’s part of a proper name (19 votes — 16%)
• Never (47 votes — 39%)

Total votes: 118

Thanks to everyone who voted!  I wish I could have polls on here again.

Personally, I voted for never.  I detest the word thru.  I think it’s lazy, unnecessary and an insult to our language.

Granted, I can also see the other point of view.  I think that the English language is complicated, especially when written, and so many of our words have silent letters.  That makes it difficult for children and people learning English.  I speak French, Italian and Spanish (the latter quite badly), and I love that I can read an Italian sentence aloud and pronounce it perfectly because everything is pronounced the same way.  (French is another story.)

But does that mean we need to invent new words to make it easier for those who struggle?  I don’t think so.

If we keep going at this rate, are we going to see the word enuf appearing in print soon?

43% of you said that the word thru is okay in certain circumstances.

So, tell me, which circumstances are those?