Last night, while I was in the midst of a trash television binge—(think something along the lines of The Biggest Loser, Millionaire Matchmaker and Super Nanny) one of the show participants critiqued her fellow reality star’s inability to ‘conversate.’ I cringed. Either the show’s editors don’t know that’s not a word or they were trying to prove a point—this woman really was a bimbo. Either way, I think it’s unfortunate.
I know we all make grammatical mistakes and have our own verbal idiosyncrasies, but we also all have our pet peeves. And this is one of mine—when you have a conversation, you don’t conversate, you converse. When you make a presentation, you don’t presentate, you present. And when you make an adaptation, you don’t adaptate, you adapt. But I can see how it gets confusing---after all, you’re doing this for the sake of communication, so you can communicate—which doesn’t seem to fit the established pattern. Hmmm.
I suppose one way to solve this problem is to practice--reading and listening to words in context (from grammatically sound sources)is a great way to hone your skills identifying the misuse and abuse of language.
Another equally effective solution seems to be to becoming famous. Case in point: Sarah Palin. She is heralded as the invent of the word refudiate, which the New Oxford American Dictionary decided to formally recognize as the 2010 Word of the Year.
Language changes. That’s a fact that not even I can refudiate. Am I eve using that correctly?
Well, you know what I mean, so I suppose it’s served its purpose. Yet another amazing thing about language.
Word.
No comments:
Post a Comment