Word Snobs...

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!

The latest scourge...

Have you heard this ad on the radio? Or seen it on TV? Check it out...

Some adjectives that come to mind: inane, asinine, elementary, embarrassing, CHEEZ WHIZ!!

And now you're gonna hate me, because it's in your head, isn't it?

Sorry! I just can't believe that our tax dollars are going for something like this. Aside from the fact that this campaign is highly deserving of the adjectives above, I wonder if we need to spend money to tell people to wash their hands. Really? People don't know the benefits of hand-washing? Really? Does this ad make it more clear? Really -- how many people over the age of 4 don't know you should wash your hands? How many over the age of 4 don't wash their hands when necessary?

And how much money are we throwing at this dubious problem?

And, honestly, I don't want this to be part of the definition of a Washingtonian...I reiterate: embarrassing!

I think the whole concept is as ridiculous at the song...

And the song is SO annoying that I think a continuous loop could replace water-boarding as torture...