DAILY PROMPT
Aimless
I was thinking about aimless last night as I stood at the sink doing the washing up. Not because doing the washing up is aimless when you consider I don’t have a dishwasher (one plate per day, one set of cutlery, one mug, one glass, one teaspoon – a dishwasher?) but because I’d just checked on yesterday’s word, which shows up here when the day is pretty much done.
Anyway, I was thinking about aimless, and what I thought was that it’s one of those words that doesn’t have its own antonym: aimful, for example. Or aimple. Which didn’t get me very far in the serious business of thinking up something D&M to say about it, but it did start me thinking about words in general – a well-worn pathway in my brain, and there’s more washing up when you have house guests. (Most nights my daughter does it.)
Now I know I’m old. I know that youth has always tended to equate age with senility. I know that modern society sees us as a waste of money and not a source of accrued wisdom. And I also know that language must constantly evolve to stay alive. But bugger me! There’s a big difference between evolving and disintegrating.
I’ve pretty much given up on different from, discretion being the better part of valour. Different to and different than are so widely used now that I can’t win – even though no one says differ to or differ than, but who am I to argue?
Acclimate, though – what on earth’s that about? Are we sick of acclimatise? Or was someone too stupid to think of the right word and too lazy to look it up, and other people went along with it for fear of being left behind in the rush to be trendy? Trendy my…whatever! Acclimate is an ugly word that sounds what it is: rubbish.
And then we get to parse. The current use of parse twists something vital deep in my gut. It’s as if someone stumbled upon it, thought empty shell ripe for reuse and threw it out there to make themselves look super-intellectual. And the real tragedy is that only dinosaurs like me will appreciate the depth of their stupidity. Because parse does NOT mean analyse, define, explain, lay out or any of the other things it’s been lassoed to stand in for.
Parse means ‘to describe a word or series of words grammatically, identifying parts of speech, syntactic relationships etc.’ And if, like me, you’d been taught to parse in your youth, you’d know that it’s an exact science that has nothing to do with implications or deeper meaning as claimed by the second definition in Dictionary.com.
You’d also know that parsing in its true sense has a lot going for it. It’s much easier to learn another language if you understand parts of speech and their grammatical relationships in your own. But even more importantly – if some idiot hadn’t decided that parsing was too taxing for tiny minds, the English language wouldn’t have degenerated into the grammatical pigs’ breakfast it is today. And maybe – just maybe – we’d have enough respect for it to differentiate between progress and linguistic corruption.
helen meikle's scribblefest 
Acclimate vs. acclimatize — I think it might be one of those things that varies between continents. In many respects, the English spoken in the US is a kind of fossil along with being mixed with all the languages from other large migrations not British. But I was curious so I looked it up: http://www.lostinthepond.com/2014/07/ukus-word-differences-which-was-coined.html#.V2hmqOYrLEY There are a lot of words like that that make my teeth itch; nouns made into verbs then “re-nouned” again with an ENDING on the already hybridized verb. Yesterday I got very pissed at a British art historian for identifying the very obvious SLEIGHS aboard a Viking vessel as SLEDGES. I wanted to hit him upside the head and show him a photo of my grandma filling a cistern from a well, the cistern is on a SLEDGE that will be pulled home by two of the biggest horses I’ve ever seen.
You’re right, and I’m chomping on a big wedge of humble pie. (Love the link. I’ve saved it to my favourites.) But for whatever reason, acclimate has only just come my way – partly the continent thing no doubt, but it’s not as if I don’t read lots of American literature so who knows why.
I think politicians started the language rot. Pollie speak is an abomination. And the nouns into verbs business… ‘she medalled’.Even thinking about it makes my jaw clench and my teeth grind.
I, too, hate the verbing of nouns. Nasty.
P.S. Differentiate is one of those words. Differ was once a verb. We could “differ” between two objects to determine their “difference” and now we don’t “differ” unless we have a dispute; otherwise, we differentiate. Language. It’s a whore.
It is a whore, but whores have their own lines in the sand that should not be crossed by crass ignorance!
How about prioritize as oppose to setting priorities, or to me, even more aggravation is “That’s so fun!” I hate it. I also ignore it. The river is too big to push. American English is a very undiscriminating language. We take on all comers.
Yes it is a big river, but I can’t help paddling upstream. ‘Bored of’ is another one
even more aggravating == my fingers betray me
🙂 Finger – mind discords are different!