At a family gathering Sunday night, I received, as a belated birthday gift, a book titled: Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting It Right.
It opened the floodgates of irritation as most members of the family recounted the MISusage of many a word.
Word Snobbery -- it runs in the family...
Main sources of irritation? NUKE-YA-LUR instead of NEW-CLEE-UR...Oh that's a bad one!
Running a close second: SHER-BERT instead of SHER-BET...BET, people it's sherBET!
And then there's FLUSTRATED...FLUSTRATED? FRUSTRATED, not FLUStrated.
LIT-UH-CHURE...uh, no LIT-ER-A-TURE
REEL-A-TUR...It's REAL-TOR!
PER-SER-VERE...uh,uh -- PER-SEH-VERE
ACROST...no, ACROSS -- no T
A couple of the kids were wondering how people get WORSH out of WASH...It's not WORSHINGTON, it's WASHINGTON!
We finally stopped after declaiming the folly of interchanging THEN and THAN...
But we could have gone on much longer...It was great fun!!
I felt much better afterwards, until I started reading my new book and discovered that while we are Word Snobs, we are hypocritical ones. Apparently there are a few words that we are not using correctly ourselves. At least they are none of the above...
We will continue to enjoy the Sport of Word Snobbery as a family, and I look forward to the venting of additions to our misusage collection at our next gathering.
I think we should consider prizes for the best addition...and maybe t-shirts that we can use to inform the world of needed corrections...
I love my family!
I don't know if I dare have a conversation with you anymore.....I'll be too self conscious...
ReplyDeletefor some of us English is a 2nd language....
ok--I'll forget as soon as we start chatting!!
Did you hear they are forecasting a cool, dry summer!! I can live with that!!
I love it. There are so many misuses of language that are crazy, however don't you find that some are cultural, familial, etc? I say flusterated all the time when I'm with my family (I tend not to say it with "normal" people though). I thing the "warsh" in Washington is generational (my grandma said it all the time and was born and raised in WASHington).
ReplyDeleteThat book sounds fun...I will be careful when talking with you though (or not...I may just make up words when talking with you. haha).