*WARNING - THIS IS NOT A POLITICAL POST NOR A RANT*
So my brain is scrambled today, but obviously not as foggy as the brains of some folks who get their 5 minutes of TV fame.
A short while ago, I wrote something called Tired Terms. This new post is similar to that....but not quite.
Some background.
I have been following the World news about environmental greenhouse gases, and Kyoto, and listening to the various experts comment on the state of the world, and the state of Canada within that world. It's pretty interesting stuff, and I seem to learn something new all the time. Today was no exception, with a certain individual discussing the situation, using very long sentences with almost unpronounceable words (and, at times, losing me in the process). However, amidst the intelligence, the long sentences and the eloquence of the words came the following.....
"This is an intregal part....blah blah blah....."
INTREGAL?!@? What the heck is INTREGAL? There is no such word! Now, there is integral, as in "This is an integral part....." BUT NOT INTREGAL!!!
Now to be fair, I have to thank the person who used this word, because without that, there would be no post today. But, also, as things would have it, this jettisoned a slew of other baddies.
NUCULAR as opposed to NUCLEAR (we've all heard that one to be sure).
ORIENTATED as opposed to ORIENTED (a common baddy).
EXSCAPED as opposed to ESCAPED (this one, however, curls my toes).
LUCKED OUT as opposed to LUCKED IN (people are always confusing these 2, using Lucked Out when they got lucky and Lucked In when they actually lost out on something).
Maybe I am too picky. Maybe I am fussy about language. But geez, louise, get it right!
So with that, I leave you with this. I am going to exscape from my drab daily life, and get orientated into a nucular society, where speaking well is an intregal part of everyday happenings, and I may even luck out and win a million bucks in the process.
8 comments:
I've known people to say dethawed. HUH?
tg - intregal was used a few times (I guess this qualifies as idiot then).
barb - huh? dethawed? I guess that means that it was re-frozen....??
The person sounded so intelligent too. Words that I never heard of.
Oh well...I am so glad that I got these off my chest.
It cracks me up when people that supposedly know what they are talking about talk this way. I, BTW, don't buy into this global warming theory stuff. The glaciers have been melting for eons now and it seems like it will happen no matter what we do. Yes, we have helped it a little with industrialization around the globe, but it was on it's own course before that. Just my opinion lol.
mike - thx for stopping by. For me, no comment on Global Warming, at least not publicly on this blog :-)
cheers!
"Orientate" when used as a transitive verb means the same as "orient" when used as a transitive verb. :-)
thx Mairin - no question about what you are saying, but the two words are often used badly or incorrectly........
[Q] From David Holland: “I am uneasy about the word orientated as in business-orientated. I feel the word should be oriented. Am I right, wrong, pedantic, or what?”
[A] We have a minor oddity here, in that both orient and orientate come from the same French verb, orienter, but were introduced at different times, the shorter one in the eighteenth century and the longer in the middle of the nineteenth. There’s been a quiet war going on between the two of them ever since. I tend to use oriented and orientated pretty indiscriminately myself, choosing the shorter one when it seems to fit the flow of the sentence. Robert Burchfield, in the Third Edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, says “one can have no fundamental quarrel with anyone who decides to use the longer of the two words”. But all this is a British view, since here orientated is common; in the US it is less so and considered much less a part of the standard language. So, as always, it’s as much a case of who you are writing for and where you are doing so.
Another take on Orient and Orientate.........
What is the difference between "orientate" and "orient"?
(Fine shades of meaning)
Both are transient verbs, and both mean the same thing. However, the OED 2 (complete) does not list citations for "orientate" or "orientated" beyond 1926. Citations for "orient" and "oriented" are provided up to 1977. Our google search for "orientated" returned 202,000 entries, our search for "oriented" returned in excess of 4,000,000 entries. Current usage falls clearly on the side of "orient" and "oriented".
Oohhh...Exscaped vs. Escaped bothers me beyond belief. I don't understand where people even got the "x".
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