Words without End

Will the madness never end?  I mean, really?  Don’t we already have enough words in the English Language to screw up without creating new ones?

Take the words WEB and LOG.  What immediately comes to mind?  I think of spiders and cabins, respectively.  Of the former, I disapprove, and of the latter, I’d like to own one.  In what strange universe do you ram the two together like out of control runaway Amtrax carriers and get BLOG?  That sounds like something Blimpy would say in an old Popeye the Sailor Man cartoon.  WEBLOG – ram them together, whittle the WE off of the beginning, and suddenly you’re writing in the BLOGOSPHERE, which I presume is somewhere out beyond the atmosphere, stratosphere and the Madison Square Garden falling New Year’s Eve Sphere.

It’s bad enough that we can’t agree upon the meaning of easy words without creating brand new ones to screw up.  I speak American English – or at least some form of it.  My formative years were lived in North Central New Jersey, a mere thirty miles from New York City.  That’s two strikes against me right out of the chute.  Head west to Chicago, and they speak an entirely different language.  Go north to Canada, and they speak UK English with a French twist in the east, and perhaps a little Slavic in Sarah Palin’s Alaska.  That doesn’t even take into account parts of the south where I’m not certain that they’re speaking any known form of English.

And we’re not the only game in town.  The rest of the world speaks UK English.  If an East Ender goes out with his bird for a fag, it has entirely different connotations than it does here in the Colonies.  And there are other differences as well.  I wear BOOTS, while my Brit friends have them in the back of their automobiles, but I guess one should expect that given that they drive on the wrong side of the road, and their steering wheels, whatever they call them, are on the passenger side.  And Traffic Circles (they call them ROUNDABOUTS) don’t even get me started on that crazy idea!

So this week I heard another new word SNOWMAGEDDON.  Used, of course, with reference to the Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of ‘11.  This is not to be confused with the Great Snow of ’10, the Great Blow of ’09, the Great Blizzard of ‘67 or the Perfect Storm of ’01.  What in the world is a SNOWMAGEDDON?  God destroying the world in a Midwest snowstorm?  After all, He DID promise to never again destroy the world by flooding it, Al Gore and the Global Warming Fanatics aside.  And speaking of the former Vice President and Senator from the Great State of Tennessee, where does his weather forecast allow for the Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of ’11?  And will we call it G²DB-11, thereby creating yet another totally useless new word, or at least a totally useless new acronym?  And where does the End of the World (EOTW) in Dec, 2012 fit into this Global Linguistic Cataclysm (GLC – and wasn’t that the name of some Japanese model automobile)?

Sorry – off topic a little.  Got carried away.

Can’t we just return to a kinder, gentler, more simple way of life, where an AUDIBLE is something you hear and not a play changed at the line of scrimmage,  where going postal means delivering a letter, and where throwing a conniption actually makes some sort of sense?  A world where SNOWMAGEDDONS and BLOGOSPHERE’s don’t exist?  A world where television news people pronounce BOTH of the letters ‘R’ in February?  And what in the world happened to the WORLD-WIDE part of the WORLD-WIDE-WEB that was sublet to create the WEBLOG to begin with?

These are important questions that need to be answered – or, at least BLOGGED about.