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I get rather annoyed with the way newscasters and journalists suddenly decide to change the pronunciation of certain words or make up new ones out of a clear blue sky, and then suddenly everyone is doing it.
It's always bugged me that sometime in the last decade and a half, the word I had always pronounced as "Huh-RAHS-ment" suddenly turned into "Harris-ment". And at some point in time a "troop" became ONE soldier and not, well, a "troop" of soldiers.
More recently, journalists in the sewing industry have decided to use the word "sewist" for one who sews, rather than the perfectly acceptable word sewer, for fear I suppose, that even in context people might mistake it for the similarly spelled and differently pronounced word meaning a pipe that takes away waste. Personally I'd rather risk someone making the mistake. "Sewist" sounds awfully pretentious to me.
Today, in separate radio newscasts (we were running errands all day and listening to Public Radio) I heard a couple of words that made me blink.
In the first, I learned that a person who is of the ethnic group that I have always known as "Bosnian" is now called a "Bosniac". Say what? Since when? It sounds odd and makes me think of "maniac" and "Brainiac", neither of which have particularly positive connotations. Who decided to make this change? Why? What purpose does it serve? And how long before everyone else is saying "Bosniac"? Is a person from Florida sudden going to become a "Floridiac"? Or will Canadians become "Canadiacs"?
And then there was the discussion of politics. This group of pundits was discussing the upcoming debates and what the President and his opponent's strategy was going to be, and how it was going to go and they started talking about this being a "pre-mortem". Huh? They are going to dissect it BEFORE it'sdead, er, happened? That has got to be one of the dumbest bits of politispeak (see I can adapt to some new words) I have ever heard of. You can hash something out all you want before it happens, but for goodness' sake! find a word for the process that makes SENSE! "Post-mortem" for going over something AFTER it happens makes a certain amount of metaphorical sense. But "mortem" does not mean "talk about something"; "mortem" refers to DEAD! *sheesh!!!*
Dumb. Just dumb.
It's always bugged me that sometime in the last decade and a half, the word I had always pronounced as "Huh-RAHS-ment" suddenly turned into "Harris-ment". And at some point in time a "troop" became ONE soldier and not, well, a "troop" of soldiers.
More recently, journalists in the sewing industry have decided to use the word "sewist" for one who sews, rather than the perfectly acceptable word sewer, for fear I suppose, that even in context people might mistake it for the similarly spelled and differently pronounced word meaning a pipe that takes away waste. Personally I'd rather risk someone making the mistake. "Sewist" sounds awfully pretentious to me.
Today, in separate radio newscasts (we were running errands all day and listening to Public Radio) I heard a couple of words that made me blink.
In the first, I learned that a person who is of the ethnic group that I have always known as "Bosnian" is now called a "Bosniac". Say what? Since when? It sounds odd and makes me think of "maniac" and "Brainiac", neither of which have particularly positive connotations. Who decided to make this change? Why? What purpose does it serve? And how long before everyone else is saying "Bosniac"? Is a person from Florida sudden going to become a "Floridiac"? Or will Canadians become "Canadiacs"?
And then there was the discussion of politics. This group of pundits was discussing the upcoming debates and what the President and his opponent's strategy was going to be, and how it was going to go and they started talking about this being a "pre-mortem". Huh? They are going to dissect it BEFORE it's
Dumb. Just dumb.