All wrathed up with nowhere to go

I have made the fatal mistake of watching tv today. Australian spin on the crap shows of other countries and [gods smite me] the cricket. I don’t like sport. It’s having the tv on without the sound off that’s the problem. I’ve just heard a media professional talk about how the lovely two teams were going to have a ‘minute’s silent’ to pay their respects to London. I don’t object to this at all. Very worthy, beats the hell out of live idiot, doesn’t cost anyone anything, and shows a modicum of respect for tragedy and suffering and a solidarity so frequently lacking in this society. What is shitting me is the ‘minute’s silent’. Anyone can have a slip of the tongue. Anyone can mispronounce. It’s the continual mispronunciation of oft used words that bothers me. This, coupled with the appalling and exceedingly slack habit of dropping the beginnings and endings of words, makes our media, and by default the rest of us, look utterly ridiculous. Screw ridiculous, it makes us look stupid. Here’s a news flash worth paying attention to – words have meanings, often very particular meanings, many words are very, very similar. When you start dropping letters some of those words become other words. When the word you intended to use becomes another word your meaning is lost. [And you sound like a prat, just as I sound like a pedant.] I used to have a friend who did this all the time, actually I’m pretty sure she still does – we just aren’t friends anymore. She never could understand why people continually misunderstood her. Mind you, she never quite understood the difference between ‘nothing’ and ‘anything’ and found them interchangeable. She didn’t [and, let’s face it, who does?] like correction even though it led to much confusion and was not, as in never once, self-correcting. There is a certain amount of horror for many of us when we discover that we’ve been unintentionally misusing words [sometimes for years]. She seemed to think the dictionary, the people around her, and the world ought to change and adhere to her understanding of things. But she wasn’t self-centred, oh no. [Note the use irony here.] The real problem is how damn common her mentality is.
I love this language. I love its history. I love its peculiarities. I love how sluttish it is. I love how old words acquire new meanings. I love how words are constantly being added to the language. That’s pretty cool. What I don’t understand is the total contempt so many have for the language they speak and write. It is a primary form of communication. It deserves some kind of respect, some attempt to correctly enunciate [not ‘nunciate’ – is that something nasty one does to nuns?] the words one uses. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were able and chose to say what we meant and actually meant what we’ve said? I guess I’m just sick of having to guess at meanings and to use instinct over logic when it comes to understanding people. Too much bloody effort.
This rant ends here, for now.