Well, this stopped being a weekly blog pretty quickly, but I seem to have a trend of blogging about things I think are bad or could be better. So, maybe that's a sign I haven't felt that way about things recently? Following that trend, here's some of the many words I feel are bad as linguistic constructs (not for the reasons other "bad words" are bad) and we could do without.
queue
Okay let's start with some low-hanging fruit/upsetting anyone from the U.K. who happens to read this. I think queue as a part of the English language is great. It is good that the art of queueing is a cultural phenomenon in the U.K. and I hope it will find its way into the U.S., somehow most grocery stores don't get that one shared line for multiple registers is a direct upgrade and people still struggle with the idea that you shouldn't get on a BART car or elevator until the people on it get off. I think having the word queue as a synonym of line to distinguish the way Englishmen line up from us is great. Queues are also a great data structure, and I can remember that BFS is the one that uses a queue by just remembering "barbeque". But like, why did the French see the Middle French "queu", a word that in the French pronunciation is pronounced like how I would think to pronounce "qu" and then added a third useless letter? (My theory is they foresaw keyboards and they just wanted to be able to practice trills while typing.)
terrific
So if you take a combination of one of the prefixes horr- and terr- and one of the suffices -or, -ibble, and -ific, you get a word with negative connotations except for if you combine terr- and -ific and you get terrific, which is a good thing. Terrific upsets me not just for this reason, but because we already have so many words that mean "good" and have a bit of flourish to them (awesome, amazing, extraordinary, incredible, stupendous...) that terrific doesn't even have the defense of "it adds diversity to one's vocabulary" because the synonyms of "good" are past the point where having more will really add much diversity.
twelfths
The e in twelfths is carrying a lot of baggage in the pronunciation of that word. Just getting through the (count 'em) five consonants smushed together requires me to put some amount of thought into how I'm moving my tongue so I don't just say "twelfs" instead (I admit I'm not the best at speaking in general, though). I've never been more aware of the shapes my tongue makes while I pronounce things since I took an acoustics class. I think the language issue here is that the numbers 11-19 have a different naming scheme than 21 onwards, instead of calling them "tenny-one, tenny-two" or something like that (which after letting it sit for a bit doesn't sound that dumb, it's like "Lord Tennyson"). "Tenny-seconds" is much easier to say than twelfths and is consistent with the rest of the numbers' names. It even dodges the issue that "Sixty-seconds" has, of sounding like you're talking about a minute and not the fraction 1/62. As another alternative, it could just be pronounced "twelveth" instead so there's a reasonable break between the consonants, and this also has the benefit that it mirrors how the rest of the fractions 1/11 to 1/19 just add a "-th" to the corresponding word without modifying it.
bookkeeper
This word is annoying because it has three instances of doubled letters in a row. I'm a fairly fast typer, (not professional grade but I can beat my friends in typeracer which is the real test so I may as well be). But I really struggle to type this word correctly without focusing very hard because my fingers just can't comprehend that I want them to double-tap keys three times in a row and in the middle of typing it I start to feel like there should also be two Ps because why not, O K and E already did it. Here's some tries at typing the word without backtracking:
bookepeer
bookkeeeper
bookeeper
bookkeeper
bookkeeper
bookeeper
bookeeper
bookkeepr
I think my K key might not be functional because I swear I double tapped it for several of those attempts which came out as "bookeeper". But maybe I just mind-tricked myself because I double-tapped O and E before and after.
This word is actually pretty fine, most of the issues come from typing it quickly, writing it isn't an issue because it's slower and there's less dexterity needed. But triple-doubles should stick to being a basketball-and-Taco-Bell-only thing.
tertiary
So this word follows secondary, and I feel like it should be "thirdary" but hey maybe there's another prefix for words related to the number three that sounds better or something. Something like "triary", because we use tri- as a prefix for three all the time! Nope, it's tertiary. I can't think of any other word that uses the prefix "terti-" in a manner meaning of or relating to three. Just to confirm this, I looked up what words in the dictionary start with "tert-" (since I'm honestly not sure whether "tert" or "terti" is doing the work of a prefix here) and I found tertial, tertian, and tertullian. Tertial is something to do with feathers, tertian means having to do with paroxysms that occur every other day (so it's really more to do with the number two) and tertullian, which is just someone's name. So we already have a perfectly good and common prefix in "tri" and we just randomly decided to borrow from a new root just for this one word, without even doing the same for related words.
floccinaucinihilipilification
I had to learn this word for a spelling test in 5th grade (I still remember how to spell it; I typed it here without looking it up). That's actually not the reason this word is on the list, it's fun to spell and say and when you're a nerdy 5th grader who was memorizing digits of pi for fun, learning how to spell a finitely long word with much more structure to it than irrational numbers is great. Also, I don't think it's right for anyone whose parents' last name is "Vaidyanathan" to have strong feelings about words being longer than necessary.
It's moreso the fact that a man named William Shenstone took four Latin words that all mean the same thing and smashed them together in a letter as what I assume was an attempt to be dramatic (with hyphens between them by the way, so "flocci-naucci-nihili-pili-fication"; it is very clear this is not him trying to invent a new word), and then a bunch of other people said he was inventing a new word as a joke and ran with it. It's the 1800s equivalent of if I sent my friend a text saying something was "super-duper-turbo-fantastic" and then next thing you know superduperturbofantastic is a word in the Oxford dictionary because people thought it was funny. It's also a word that more or less only exists because people think it's funny such a word exists, and just devalues having a centralized authority of sorts who determines what words are "real" and make the cut for the dictionary. If people are upset that "literally" can be redefined to mean "not literally but used for emphasis anyway" I think those people should also be upset floccinaucinihilipification is in the dictionary, because it definitely has less value and common use.
(Also, the act of saying "cinihilipilifi" is dumb).
No comments:
Post a Comment