DMB Digest: Champing at the Linguistic Bit
I'm gonna totally Twit this bling to the Tik Tak, yo!
I get it. Languages evolve, and for a handful of good reasons. But laziness shouldn’t be considered a “good” reason.
Sometimes technological advances lead to new terminology such as the noun “mainframe” or the verb, “to google.” “To tweet” no longer necessarily means pursing one’s lips to form a bird call. That’s all fine and good. I’m not so old fashioned.
Sometimes cultural shifts lead to the adoption of new vocabulary as in the case of the verb, “twerk.” This is a wonderful mechanism of language. In this specific case, it’s like a tasteless, weird jerk were to tweak his/her back while attempting a salacious dance move. Voilà! The word twerk is born!
Every generation also asserts its desire to customize language in a ritualistic effort to categorize each other into in camps (and therefore out camps). I’m old enough now to have seen a few of these generational language modifications come and go with varying long-lasting affect. Over the years, ostentatious jewelry has gone from bijouterie to trim to bling bling to drip. That’s only natural. Personally, I love making my youngest son feel uncomfortable by using all the latest lingo, “Check out my drip! It’s totally OP!” (He rolls his eyes and shakes his head.) Then I drive the gag totally into the ditch by messing up easy social media platform names, “I’m gonna totally Twit this bling to the Tik Tak, yo! The Toobers and the Gritters ain’t got nothing on me!” If you know any young people, you should try this routine on them. The sensitive ones will turn bright red guaranteed.
The best form of language evolution is the thoughtful, slow-rolling kind that starts as a personalized embellishment and then grows into a localized improvement before eventually (perhaps decades later) blossoming into a helpful regional adaptation. We see an example of this in vocabulary differences such as “sprinkle” and “spritz” for a light rain. At this point, both of these words are officially recognized as having a significant and unique meaning.
But what about all the early form adaptations that have yet to take hold on a broader scale? Of the vocabular tweaks that I’m familiar, my favorites include:
Ginder: a dingleberry of the face and/or facial hair. (I credit this one to some friends in SLC.)
Graupel: a soft, melted form of snow that looks like tiny styrofoam balls. (This one might finally be catching hold on a broader scale.)
Pisquachie: liquidy bird poop. (My mom says my dad made this one up.)
Jackwagon: a no-good, lazy lowlife. (I give credit for this one to my welding/pipe hand buddy, even though it was in a Geico commercial not that long ago.)
All of these forms of linguistic evolution are to be celebrated. But there is one form I simply cannot tolerate, and that form is lingual apathy. Think of this as the linguistic equivalent of shrugging one’s shoulders and saying, “Meh.” It’s akin to surrendering to dunderheads and pronunciation thugs. There are a couple forms of this, but neither should be tolerated. The first form is most often seen in colloquialisms that people simply can’t remember and thereby misquote or approximate. There’s no longer a good excuse for this, people. Google it! We don’t “sure up” things. We shore them up. We don’t “chomp at the bit,” we champ at the bit. We don’t throw our hat in the circle, we throw it in the ring.
The second form of this sinister linguistic misappropriation stems from the whole of society submitting to regional quirks. A small, seasonal-flowing river is a creak, not a crick. A flexible storage container with an opening at the top is a bag, not a beg. Yeah, yeah, I realize that currently these two examples are still spelled identically while “merely” being pronounced differently. That’s how it starts! Don’t let these so-called “mispronunciation advocates” fool you. They will stop at nothing short of tearing down the language that binds us together! What starts in the spoken language eventually ends up in the written language. And once that happens, how are we supposed to make heads or tails of avoiding a wuf by climbing on a ruf while warshing a laundry beg in the crick? Huh? Huh? Answer me that! For the love of all things holy!
It’s one thing to twerk on the Tik Tak, but it’s an entirely different one to chomp at the bit for cleaning plastic begs out of the crick.
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