Word Play

Quick: how many times can you use the word amazing in a two-minute TV interview? Increase word usage if you are the star of a newly-released movie. Under the age of 30? Double the count. Barely out of high school; not considering higher education? You can probably max out the scoring matrix.

That's amazing!

Kudos to the local supermarket that is encouraging families to organify their lives. Language is dynamic, so it's this kind of advertising creativity that sparks new words that much too quickly become part of our recognized lexicon.

Totally surreal (another one of my favorite widely-used expressions of the day)!

And congratulations to the morphing of two totally different words, racism and prejudice, so they can be used interchangeably and both be annointed with negative connotation. It was just a couple of years ago that prejudice could apply to a wide array of strong feelings for or against a person, place, idea, event, or thing, but now it's simply another way to say "white." People haven't positioned the word bigot for re-usage yet, but I can hardly wait to see how that plays in today's cultural environment.

Way to repurpose, people!

I grimace my way through sloppy slang expressions, such as "it don't matter," and I cringe with the familiar use of "Her/Him and I," but ignorant people who misuse words and then certify their misuse as the proper usage really grate on my nerves.