Monday, January 22, 2018

*SIGH* ~~ Heavily Edited and Reprinted from 7/4/2011

No, I don't!!!

Well! I haven't done a "Grammar Nazi" post since last September. However, I've decided to recycle another old post that deserves the "Grammar Nazi" label. Perhaps you find that "Sad!" as a certain "Baby-in-Chief" of ours would say.

This trend has been going on on Facebook for quite a while now. I know you're all familiar with it. Remember back in the day back in the good old days, when you wanted to make someone your friend? You would "befriend" him or her. But for quite some time, thanks to freakin' Facebook, the verb has been bastardized simplified to "friend." Additionally, if you later wish to reverse that decision, you "unfriend" them, whereas in the old days, you would... ummm... "run them over with your car." (Or is that just me? Heh.)

So, what's next? Instead of feeding my cat, Orson, do I now have to "food" him?

To screw up an old cliché, "The more things change, the more they stay deranged," eh?

A brief but characteristic digression here, before I sign off: Back in 2000, when tattoo parlors finally became legal in the state of Massachusetts after a thirty-eight-year ban, a local business named its four in-residence artistes on a sign featuring their nicknames: Bill, Spike, House (a really tall, overweight guy), and Chip. I sent a facetious email to one of my forty-seven friends named Jennifer, asking "Are those names, or nouns?" She replied "Both! They're also verbs!Heh. I love my friends...

Thanks for your time.

12 comments:

  1. I'm sure Orson would be happy no matter if it was feed or food or fed or...fod? As long as he got it.

    It sure has become casual now to say friend. Even I use the stupid thing when making fun of farcebook.

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  2. ..."run them over with your car." (Or is that just me? Heh.
    No, it isn't. Ha. So now I'm supposed to food my cat, Mongo? Dear Lord. Well, FB got my attention for an hour or so and then I closed that book forever. One hour... One hour too many.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was on FB for a whole year, then quit.

      By the way, Blue, your mention of FB in your recent post is what made me run this one again.

      Delete
  3. Ha I never even opened that book.

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    Replies
    1. I don't think you're missing anything, True, although milliuons would disagree with me.

      Delete
  4. FB can be exhausting, but I have found some interesting posts on there (when I have time to pop over to the FB world.) Quite often, someone in the family mentions something to me about this or that, and when I relay that I don't know what they're talking about or hadn't heard of the social event they're discussing, they'll look at me like I'm an alien and say, "Didn't you see it, I put it on Facebook?"
    So it seems, if I want to be invited to a family anything, I better check out FB for dates and times and events. And if I don't, well maybe none of my electronics were working that day so I was cut off from the world. :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, I know a few people who rely on FB a bit too much for keeping in touch with people and informing them about this and that. I must admit I got back in touch with a couple of high school friends after over thirty years, but once I quit Facebook, we fell out of touch again.

      Delete
  5. Oh goodness. Sorry. Laughing at the tattoo parlor part.

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  6. Tattoo parlours were illegal?? :)

    I'm on FB - good for getting back in touch with old school friends and such like. Not meant for news. Ok in small doses.

    Might enjoy reading this, btw - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/23/never-get-high-on-your-own-supply-why-social-media-bosses-dont-use-social-media?

    Technology has spawned a whole set of noun turned verbs - the weirdest being 'googled' 'whatsapped', 'skyped', etc but you say a thing often enough, next thing it gets included in a dictionary and stops being strange...Many English nouns work as verbs - eye, table, pen, log, clock, hand...very different from my mother-tongue.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the state of Massachusetts, tattooing was illegal for thirty-eight years, ostensibly due to health concerns, IIRC.

      You're right about things that eventually enter the dictionary. But what bothers me is when they change definitions, rules of grammar, etc. after too many people make the same freakin' mistake. For example, we are now allowed to use "literally" to mean both "literally" and "figuratively!" And I'm just waiting for the day that it becomes acceptable to make a word plural by adding an apostrophe and an "S" because so many people do that nowadays! (For example, "toy's" instead of "toys." AUGH!!!)

      Thanks for the link. Going there now.

      Delete

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