2021, education, History, Speeches, Uncategorized, Words

Alas…

105 Comments

It’s fairly well documented that William Shakespeare coined a lot of  words (sources go as high as 2000) that we use commonly today:

    • Auspicious
    • Bloody
    • Dwindle
    • Frugal
    • Gnarled
    • Majestic
    • Multitudinous
    • Premeditated
    • Sanctimonious

There are also scads of phrases that he was the first to use and that we still use today:

    • Seen better days
    • Too much of a good thing
    • Love is blind
    • Set your teeth on edge
    • The game is up

Unfortunately, having seemingly absorbed the rules of language and grammar in my youth, I am often (read “always”) torn when I come across a new word.  Part of me wants to send these new words to the trash can and part of me wants to embrace new words wholeheartedly.  After all, think how unimaginative English would be if we hadn’t embraced “gentlefolk” or “jaded” or “pendantical”?

This week, I heard the word “bleisure” (combination of business and leisure travel) and I was a little appalled.  If there is business, can there truly be leisure?  Even my trip to Kenya and Tanzania, which was devoid of clients and official business, still felt like a business trip to me as I was surrounded by travel professionals from other companies.  But I suppose there are plenty of people out there who can combine business and pleasure, making the word “bleisure” useful.  I just can’t see myself ever using it.

Anything new bugging you this week?

105 thoughts on “Alas…”

  1. Sherrilee, everything new bugs me. Jane got SO tired of me saying “I don’t know, did they have them in the fifties?” And on hearing the answer “no,” replying, “can’t be any good then.” I daren’t ever say thst one again in front of her, but that’s how I feel about words, vehicles, breeds of cattle, just about anything except garden machinery and cbainsaws, which have improved to the point of being fun to use.
    “Gentlefolk,” they are not gentle. I wouldn’t embrace them, I’d shoot them.
    And with that, I introduce my fifties style user name, and see whether I get arrested.

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  3. Congratulations, Fenton, on your new digit-free identity. I knew you could do it.

    Portmanteaus, like bleisure, if you can call it a portmanteau, can be witty or even graceful but often they are as forced and ugly as bleisure, which sounds like it was mashed together by some travel journalist trying vainly to be clever. Fortunately, new words don’t come into common parlance unless they are generally relevant and get adopted by a critical mass of the population. I don’t see that happening with bleisure.

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  5. As you all probably know about me by now, about half of my frame of reference is in the nineteenth century and half in the twentieth, with scarcely any influence by the last twenty-one years. I still think of the twenty-first century as a recent development.
    When you ask if anything new is bugging me, I would respond in the words of Rebel Without a Cause, “Whaddya got?”

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    1. Showing us you’re not too happy in the fifties either Bill. That was Johnny in The Wild One. Not that “Johnny” come lately, the would be Brando, James Dean.
      I think I’ll duck now.

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  6. There is a trend in mental provision for “dosing” clients with the right number of hours of therapy a week, and “titrating” the dosage so they don’t get too many or too few hours. That language bugs me.

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    1. Yes regarding titrate. I am often titrating one of her drugs or mine. If I say raising or lowering a drug to medical folk they correct me.
      Utilize bugs me. Use is clearer, more basic. One of those words politicians just do adore.
      Realize: if I utilize the word in its original sense, to bring it to reality, people don’t understand. Much richer word, but I admit that in it’s modern sense, to recognize a truth, it fills a void.

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        3. I just added irrititrating to the glossary but realized once I got over there that I didn’t have a good definition. Maybe because it’s too late? Any thoughts? Thoughts?

          Liked by 1 person

        4. If it’s going to be in the glossary it should have a broad meaning. Maybe make it representative of the annoyance one feels at the imposition of a new and obfuscating term when clear, more general, language was already available.

          Liked by 3 people

  7. My Progressive insurance Snapshot is bugging me.
    It tracks my driving. I’ve been at grade A since I put the app on my phone in January. Yesterday, I needed to brake hard to avoid having a serious accident when another car went through a red light. After completing the trip, I discovered that I had been downgraded to a B+ for 4 braking events. I sent a complaining message to the app site and got a formulaic reply that they appreciated the problem but just keep driving. You get no credit for avoiding an accident. Maybe letting my car be totaled would have gotten an A+.

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    3. It is also bugging me that each time the GPS “lady”tells me where to turn, an event is registered. It’s not supposed to count against me but I get these messages that I’m using the phone while driving. “Keep your eyes on the road”. I KNOW, DAMMIT!!

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      1. That seems awfully invasive. Enough so that I wouldn’t consider Progressive as an acceptable insurance choice for me. That and what’s her name, their awful spokeswoman in the white lab dress – or whatever it is meant to be.

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        2. Many other insurance companies offer similar apps. I couldn’t say they are like Progressive but I suspect they are. A friend of mine switched insurance companies to All State and accepted their tracking app. Upon six months renewal, he had a perfect driving record but the company raised their rate. He called about why he was getting an increase and was informed that he had received an introductory rate. “So let me get this straight. I’ve proven to be very safe driver but you raise my rates?! Why don’t you want safe drivers?” He was returned to the original rate AND got the safe driver discount.

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    4. Once again, I accidentally deleted a diatribe I was engaged in. I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to finish this one, and realising how it was starting to sound. You all escaped again. It makes me wonder if it’s my subconscious, deleting things on purpose.

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  8. Rise and Express Your Inner Emily Litella (sp?), Baboons,

    What’s all this about Violins on TV? I miss Gilda Radner. Never mind.

    I love the invitation to gripe, but the second it is allowed, I can not think of a thing. Give me some time. By the end of the day I should have a prioritized list. Climate Change and #45’s attempts to re-emerge as a political force always bother me, but this invitation seems aimed at the petty, and those are not petty. I am off to the Dog Park, then weeding.

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    2. I too, have plenty of things, planned obsolescence being a major one(witness the usseful items stacked in my garage, about to be put back to work). But it’s all major, and definitely not from this week only.

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  9. Not crazy about the word “bleisure” but I am morbidly curious to see what a bleisure suit looks like . . . and the guy wearing it too!

    Chris in Owatonna
    (who used to fold and rearrange endless piles of leisure suits in the 70s daily while working at Donaldson’s department store in the Southdale Mall)

    Liked by 5 people

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  10. I am dealing with end of life finances, such a quagmire of convoluted words. I prepared Sandy’s funeral and was going to use my two small life insurance policies to cover mine. But if one of us goes into care, which is likely for Sandy almost any day, or so it seems, the county can take that money. There is a way, but Prudential will not do that. So cashed them in and used the cash to prepay mine so my kids will not have to pay. Lost $2400 and any future dividends but so it goes as Kurt Vonnegut says. But county can go back 5 years to recover money. So will they hit up my grand kids for little bits of money I put in their college funds. I recognize that I am only starting to wade I this swamp.

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      1. One thing I pretend to regret is that in Spain it’s normal to have a funeral plan, and we’ve followed suit. If I’m found dead anywhere in Spain, someone only has to search my wallet for my card(I’ll check tomorrow that it’s actually in there), ring a number and give some details. They can then get on with their day while someone fixes everything. Or so I’m led to believe.
        My reget is only that I have a particular spot by a stream in Devon, where I intended to die and be buried. Now it seems I’ll be cemented into a wall, and will have to pay rent in order to stay indefinitely. I don’t like the sound of that at all, and hope to slip away to Devon at the last minute.

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  11. Shakespeare Insult Generators are very interesting. They are pdf formatted.
    Select one word from each of three columns and put “Thou art” at the front.

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      1. When I worked in Child Protective Services I had a mug that said, “First thing we do, we kill all the lawyers.” It broke. I think a lawyer broke it.

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  12. This week I have my underwear (and it’s NOT bikini bottoms) in a bunch over the Norwegian women’s Olympic beach handball team being fined for wearing shorts rather than bikini bottoms during competition. Who are the idiots making these rules? The IHF – International Handbollocks Fuckwits – a bunch of middle aged white males, no doubt.

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    1. I’m with you PJ. In fact this bothers me so much that I don’t watch women’s volleyball in the Olympics any longer. Because I don’t notice that the men’s volleyball are wearing little tiny skinny speedo briefs. They’re wearing big baggy shorts. Unbelievable

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  13. There is a book (by Andrew Clements) and a play called ‘Frindle’ about a kid who learns how words are created and he comes up with the idea to call a pencil a frindle and try to make it common place. It’s a fun show.

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    1. Just the other day, on BookBub, there was a book offered called The Dictionary of Lost Words. Here’s how it was described:

      Esme, whose father works on the first Oxford English Dictionary, secretly collects words that don’t make the final cut. But when she discovers something surprising about her collection, Esme sets out to create a dictionary of her own.

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      1. I read an interesting book in the last year. Can’t remember the name but I can look it up later. Young man working at a firm that publishes a dictionary, in his boredom starts making up words which do actually end up in the dictionary. Then 100 years later a young woman working as an intern discovers the words.Fiction.

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        2. It is a fact that dictionaries intentionally include bogus words. They do it for copyright reasons, to detect if a competitor has simply pirated all their hard work. Maps include bogus streets for the same reason.

          Liked by 2 people

    2. I don’t know if you know the comedian Ben Elton over there. He’s said to have invented the annoying expression “The full monty,” just to see how long it would to get assimilated. And it didn’t take long.

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  14. One word that I’ve never liked, and which to me sounds almost the exact opposite of what it means, is bucolic. I think of it as a cross between Bubonic and colic, and that can’t be good.

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  15. my latest bitch is about e communication
    i was fired by shipt for detrimental behavior a lifetime ban
    i can only imagine it is because of a cigar odor complaint

    i got one got a strong reprimand and replied appropriately but got fired 4 days later after not having the car detailed

    i write a request for reversal with an explanation after not receiving a response to my request for a more concrete reason and got no reply

    i am a great worker and a bad employee

    should push me to my next thing

    Liked by 3 people

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    1. Sympathetic as I am to your plight, tim, cigar odor is obnoxious. That said, though, I don’t think any amount of detailing will alleviate the problem if you have been smoking a lot of cigars in the car. Did you just deliver food, or did you drive passengers as well?

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      2. Did they elaborate on what constituted “detrimental behavior”? Was is the fact that you failed to follow through on the detailing, or what? Did they say. A lifetime ban seems a bit severe for a one time infraction.

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  16. OT. I just picked up a hardback copy of By Love Possessed by Cozzens from the library. My copy has a page 266 on the left-hand side. 267/268 is the page that says “Part Two Noise of Hunters Heard” and then it starts up again on page 269. I was kind of hoping to solve a mystery and that may be every copy was missing pages but this copy appears to be whole. Rats.

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    1. In doing a little digging about the novel, I discovered that it at some point was offered as a Readers’ Digest condensed version. I wonder if that could have somehow resulted in the problem Steve mentioned?

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    3. I also found a hardcover version at a used book store and flipped through it but didn’t find anything missing. No reason to expect the pagination to be the same, of course, in a book in a different format from a different publisher.

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    4. My copy is in the other room, and these days that is a long and difficult walk. But here is the test. The last two copies of this book end with the protagonist and his second wife having sex during a storm. The missing copy (I know from earlier readings of the book) describes the daughter of the protagonist coming into his bedroom because the storm has shattered her sleep. She finds her father and mother-in-law doing what they are doing. The chapter ends with the second wife leaving the bedroom to go comfort her teenaged d-i-l.

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      3. So evidently some worthy soul has censored every book he can find, omitting this disgraceful happening which none of us would like to hear about. He or she just hasn’t traced every copy yet.

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        1. Have to say, glad I don’t have a stepdaughter that’s liable to wk into my room at moments like that. What’s the matter with her?

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Just went out to the car and got the book and checked. It does have the racy bits. I guess my copy is complete.

          Liked by 1 person

  18. One thing that makes me clench my teeth lately is the underwriting announcement on MPR for a therapy group of some sort. It initially sounds like a reasonably useful mental health provider, but the tag line at the end is “Care Counseling…because adulting is hard.” To my ear that just makes it sound like a support group for whiny college freshmen.

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    2. I have to admit that turning a non-verb into a verb doesn’t always cut it for me. I realize technically it’s just making a new word like any other new word but somehow it seems cheating. I just don’t see how saving two syllables by saying “adulting” instead of “being an adult” it’s just gonna be that life transforming.

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        1. Either way, they’re right: adulting is hard. I’ve been doing it for too long, and could use some care counseling. 🙂 Instead I think I’ll just slip over to the Icy Cup Farmer’s Market for my weekly dose of community and fresh veggies.

          Liked by 1 person

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