Shouting At Television News Reporters [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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"Wal-Mart is the only Maryland employer that meets this criteria."

ARGH!

Criterion! Criterion, you silly newscaster, who makes your very living from using the English language! "These criteria" I could have swallowed even though you only described a single criterion, but "this criteria" is right out!

You even paused a moment to consider the phrasing before saying that last phrase, and still got it wrong! ARGH!

#blink#

Why're you all looking at me? Doesn't everybody yell at the television? At least I don't scream at "this data" any more -- I just silently wince at that one. I've been known to applaud on the rare occasions when I hear "these data" though ...

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There are 14 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

(hugs) I know why I love you sometimes.

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I feel your pain, brother. Though I more often (nigh-daily of late) get to scream at the radio when the NPR announcer (who should KNOW BETTER) pronounces Jose Padilla's last name as if it rhymes with gorilla.

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I yell at the tv a lot, or I did when I watched it regularly, which isn't the case anymore. However I do still yell at the radio, which I only listen to in my car. One of my biggest pet peeves is "mischevious". When did people start adding another syllable to that word? There are many more, but I can't remember them right now (thankfully). Actually, I've read that my use of "thankfully" in the previous sentence isn't strictly correct grammar either, but it seems that it's usage is pretty widespread. I think saying "I am thankful that I can't recall any of the other things that bother me in language usage on television and other media" is correct. However, I could be wrong :) My dad's cousin Adele was a stickler for proper language usage. She once took me to task when I answered the phone and she asked me "How are you?" and I replied "I'm good" - she said "I didn't ask you about your morals". Now I still say it, but I'm also sensitized to hearing it from other people, which I do all the time. And I also use it when someone asks me if I want something - as in "Would you care for some more potatoes?" "No thanks, I'm good." Do you have many other pet peeves in language? Perhaps you'll hit on some of mine and then we can congratulate ourselves on how well we speak the language compared to dem rotten unedicated bums.

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Pet peeves in language? A veritable menagerie of them. "ATM machine". "PIN number". "From whence" (why is it people can correctly avoid saying "to whither" but still keep saying "from whence"?). Folks who try to use archaic conjugation and the old second-person singular to sound old and/or fancy but can't be arsed to bother to learn it first, or who declare it "hard" and me "a show off" for merely being able to remember when to use "-st" and when to use "-eth" and the difference between "thou" and "thee". The singular "they" (which is correct, mind you, but still really bugs me). Large numbers of homophone errors in erotica (I'll forgive one or two, though I'll still cringe). "Decimate" meaning "reduce by ninety percent" (I think both meanings are now considered acceptable; I still only like the original one).

"Virtual" vs. "logical" vs. "practical" vs. "literal".

And I'm starting to get annoyed at "ye" as an "olde sounding" replacement for "the". (It's actually "þe", pronounced "the"; as the thorn fell into disuse, some folks misinterpreted the now-unfamiliar letter as looking like a 'y'.)

Oh, and a biggie: people who say "Old English" when what they mean is the English of Shakespeare and King James. (Nope, nope, that's Modern English ... just not a very modern dialect of it.) Or who say "Old English" when they mean Middle English, which is at least a more understandable error.

I could go on. There's quite the language snob almost-hidden under my casual veneer. For a suitably generous interpretation of "almost".

Hmm. Is complaining about people who can't distinguish mass from weight a language peeve or a physics peeve?

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I yelled at an episode of Law and Order (Criminal Intent, I believe. It was the New Year's Eve marathon.) The episode involved the Riemann Hypothesis, and there was supposedly something odd about the fact that the child "prodigy" was including the infinity symbol (as well as omega and theta, I believe). I'm sitting there screaming "There's nothing odd about that at all!"

I blame it on the Barenjager toast.

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I was flipping past a debate, where an imam complained that much of anti-islam "satire" imagery uses the same themes as the ones used against Jews by nazists. (Those images were scarily common here, too, back in the twenties and thirties.) The "moderate muslim" woman he was debating with said the images still weren't hate speech, because they were slandering a person we don't know existed and that "Mohammed is not an ethnicity".

At which point KJ turned and, from the other side of the room, yelled at me to turn the crap off at once.

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Yes, I yell at the TV sometimes, specifically when the local newscasters pronounce words incorrectly. Now I will do it on occasion too, when I'm really tired. but it drives me crazy when someone on the news says
Ah-ventually, it's E-ventually. Or Ah-mmediately - it's Im-mediately (short I sound). Another one is Idear - it'a an A on the end of that word, not an R.

The Boston accent drives me flipping nuts.

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Oh, all the time. Granted, mine is usually the "get a plot, hire some real writers, dammit!" variety.

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Criterionnnnnnnnnnnnnn!

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Yell at the TV?
I once THREW A BOOK at the TV.
It was when Bill Maher said he was "half Jewish".
Talk about inaccurate language!
What a SCHMUCK!!

(And as far as Walmart goes, it's not OUR fault that they are the ONLY company of their size that DOESN'T contribute a fair amount to its employees' health benefits!!)

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I can see "this data" being valid, if it is referring to the collection as a unitary object, as distinct from other collections of data. On the other hand, it's more likely to be a case of disagreement in number.

I had a parallel in mind, but in writing it out decided that it didn't quite work...so I leave it out...

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Sometimes data is like water. Other times data are like pebbles. "This data" can be correct, but usually isn't. Are we saying the same thing?

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As I was bitching to someone just the other day, "Soon, English will technically
be a dead language, as there will be no native speakers left."

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Hmm. Similar to (I've forgotten whose) prediction, "I don't know what programming language scientists will be using twenty years from now, but whatever it is will be called Fortran," I suppose what folks will have moved on to will still be called English. So Modern English will become a dead language and be replaced by something that will get its own name only after it's been in use for a while. "PoMo English" or "Late English" perhaps?

And that leads me into serious contemplation of language evolution and the state of English (I don't think we're close to a transition to a new language yet, but I'm pondering the ramifications of a Lingua Franca that is the second dialect for everyone who has it as a first language, given recent trends in "Global English") that I'm really not awake enough to deal with properly right now.

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Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Shouting At Television News Reporters

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Yell at the tv?

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January