Published on 12, July, 2020
These are not all original t o me but here goes ....
In the supermarket they sell bottles of liquid labelled "Still water". At what stage will it cease to still be water.
And talking of water, one brand says it has percolated and been filtered through rock for thousands oof years before being bottled. Good job they bottled it when they did as its best before date is only in a months time.
What does an occasional table become when it is not a table.
Who did the first person who bought a telephone want to ring?
Where did the first person who bought a car buy petrol from? Or who did the first filling station sell petrol to?
How many people died eating poisonous mushrooms and berries before they knew which ones were ok to eat?
There are many more, so what are other contributors favourites?
I understand that language is organic and ever-changing. It's part of what I love about language - especially the creative use of it in slang.
Having said that, I hate some of the laziness creeping in (thanks largely to the advent of SMS), and some ugly (in my opinion) neologisms and adaptations.
'U' is the 21st letter of the English alphabet, the chemical symbol for Uranium, or a denotation of an attribute of the upper classes. It is not a pronoun!
'Ur' is an ancient Sumerian city on the Euphrates, or a German prefix meaning 'original'. It is not a pronoun! George Bernard Shaw might have approved of it, but I'm not George Bernard Shaw!
And please... give people an incentive - but don't incentivise them! Ugh!
Sorry. A bit off track. Just sayin'...
incentivise
That's in my list of ugly words that actually do seem to have a distinct and useful meaning, along with words like 'proactive'.
To incentivise is to encourage or promote an activity by the promise of incentives, for example through a tax system, so it can also apply to a system as well as people. It's not solely about directly rewarding with incentives, more about deliberately social-engineered motivation. So 'motivate' (derived presumably from 'motive') might almost do, if it were not that a lot of people see 'motivation' as something internal. 'Enticement' also won't work because you can't talk of 'enticing' an activity, only making it more enticing. I'd welcome any solution to this dilemma that will work when you have a word count to stick to.
I still hate it. Smacks too much of commercialese. Which is another horrible word!
How long before we 'prizeize' people. Surely easier than giving them a prize...
'Proactive' is so overused that I think many people don't even really understand what it means. Likewise 'post-modern'.
The other day, I heard someone say 'It was literally indescribable.' Okay.
Oh, you must have literally died with laughter.