Stick to TV news, folks…
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Install
I got my Bh.P. many long years ago; I’ve been repeatedly, dogmatically, arbitrarily, and serially guilty of Buttheaded Prescriptivism. Only relatively recently have I worked at sanding down the sharp edges and rounding off the pointy corners with some goodly hyphens dashes of descriptivism. Just yesterday I was scrubbing my bathtub when it occurred to me how capricious, inconsistent, and silly is my objection to the use of the nouned verb ‘In·stall’, with the accent on the first syllable, rather than ‘In·stal·la·tion’. My own Stern Style Guide right here on this very site is full of equal and opposite objections to morbidly obese redundancies like ‘Trans·por·ta·tion’ instead of ‘Trans·port’ and ‘Im·por·ta·tion’ instead of ‘Im·port’. By the same dint, if I’m to be consistent I have to deprecate ‘Installation’ and favour ‘Install’. There’s nothing structurally the matter with it; we noun verbs—and vice-versa!—all the time in English: ‘Pro·ject’ (noun), ‘Pro·ject’ (verb); ‘De·tail’ (noun), ‘De·tail’ (verb); ‘Ad·dress’ (noun), ‘Ad·dress’ (verb); ‘Re·ject’ (noun), ‘Re·ject’ (verb); ‘Re·tard’ (not-very-nice noun), ‘Re·tard’ (verb). Sometimes we don’t—witness ‘Ex·haust’, noun and verb alike—but that’s probably because a needlessly-lettery nouned verb like ‘Ex·haus·ta·tion’ would be silly and needless. Just about as silly and needless as ‘Installation’, as it seems.
Sexist Styleowner.com’s Grammar Style Sucks
This site, that bills itself as a collection of virtual boutiques owned only by women (where’s the love for gay men who have better style than women?), doesn’t know the difference between “they’re” and “their.” I’m not surprised as their copywriter writes at about the same level as a high school sophomore.
Café Vinoteca One Among Thousands, Millions
Google reports about 232,000 results for “peacons” (pecans) and about 2,210,000 results for “cassarole” (casserole). If nothing else, it’s good for a laugh. Hi, Lenny!
Writing for CNN is, like, harrrrrrrd!
I’m told CNN is considered a news source in the United States. From a CNN review of the Hyundai Veloster automobile comes this loose and sloppy collection of errors. Speed is a big question? No, speed is the rate of distance travelled over time. One of my biggest questions is “What happened to article before phrase ‘fourth door’?”. I, also, would like to know, what made the writer think, four spurious commas are necessary, in the second two-sentence “paragraph”—not to mention at least eight spurious words (and the writer also needs coaching on the proper deployment and configuration of parentheticals). “Back seats” is not oneword. The writer got into…er, sorry, where, exactly? What has an occupant’s lower intestinal condition to do with the lesson E must learn? For that matter, the writer seems creepily certain an occupant of the Veloster will never again be tired, thirsty, hungry, or horny; E’s sole need will be to learn a lesson once.
