It’s very sweet to put up a website that wants nothing more than to know what your favorite word is and why.

For the record, my favorite word is ‘delicious.’

Couple disparate posts on the gratifyingly stark contrast that LanguageHat now becomes to its precedent here have brought me to this point–a point that might also really also might be My (merciful) Missifesto.

Swirling around about the degradation of the English language (not fully Engl, a milder English) as people do, this is now an oniony layering of people quoting people, but I found it here first,, like this:

That’s where [Oxford lexicographer Erin] McKean has found words like farb (not authentic, badly done), nomenklatura (non-literally; by analogy), drabble (a short story of 100 words or fewer), haxie (a hack for the Macintosh operating system) and swancho (a combination poncho/sweater).
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002154.php

That’s what I spend a good deal of my time on the internet doing. No, really. I love munging up normally non-speaking phonemes and throwing in an extra suffix to boot. Sometimes I’m even redundant on top of that! Where other people debate blogging platforms or chase free teens that are right now hot for you!, I vomit vocabulary all over the liquid plasma. Then settle down to wildgoosechase steamy teens and install another blogging tool so that I can speak with authority if ever called upon to do so. I’m really more in my element rereading and revising the three or four paragraphs I have just composed, with a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, in a casual email to a friend I’m likely to be slurring my speech around later the same night. I had a new, shall we say, ladyfriend write that I could relax because I already proved I was smart.

Was that what I was doing? Never crossed my mind. I get embarrassed about my lingual retentiveness. So, is it because I feel compelled to play by the rules, do things right in the eyes of God and Ms. Jenson (may she rest in peace), preserve, guard, honor, and cherish the hallowed lovely language, my mother tongue, as long as we both shall live (wow, that was a mixing of metaphors)? Naw. More than anything, I’m having fun and, like them gay people, it feels a little safer these days to own up to your preferences. “I didn’t chose it, but I don’t wanna lose it!” [How’s that for on the spot sloganeering?]

Not only are all sorts of non-standard words and expressions spreading like wildfire across cyberspace, they’re even entering our hallowed dictionaries!
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002598.html

I don’t care too much about dictionaries hallowed or otherwise, but otherwise, I guess that’s my scene now. I was punk in highschool–it was the easiest way I could keep track of who I hung out with. Now I see I belong, in that endearing wannabe way I have, to The Clique of Cunning Linguists. We run around through the routers, bumping into each other’s posts and exercising one or two of a small quiver of social functions we keep on hand.

Yeah! Don’t mess with us, we’re untouchable. We’re young Turks of lexicography. Uh huh. That’s right. Because, really? honestly?, I’m trying to get our communication up to speed with our consumption. Everything else, from razors to relationships, are disposable these days, why not words as well?

No, I’m not about to get T-shirts printed or anything, but it does make sense. I’ll fuck a word up in the heat of the moment, or after a little hesitation, because I need to be understood in the particular way that I think I’m particularly individual, and one-size fits-all phrases and scripted conditional conjugations just aren’t cutting it, nor will they, so I need to bend, borrow, or break the bitches until they do something kind of like what I dream of their doing, and then? I’m busy. They’re spent. I might have time for a smoke but not much of a snuggle. Sorry.

Okay, I’m not really so assholy (!); that’s just how I goof and probably it was a slit bit more interesting to hear, and perhaps a touchtouch spit tit available the nuance of the thing.

And actually, I do care. Just a little defensive about the difference between that and stuffy. I can linger on the john a little longer just to read a few more pages of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and still be ready to get right back on that night to do a line of the back of it with you. And I don’t mean that figuratively. I have bought grammar books for pleasure. I have bought grams for pleasure.

So, here’s where the other post comes in. I’ll jump back and equivocate like that a little so arrival at a point of balance is in sight. Hat man ends along these lines.

I know I can’t talk you Strunk-lovers out of your affection, but can you at least look on the damn book as an affectionate portrait of a crotchety former teacher and not as a guide to English, a task for which it is manifestly unsuited? Let it sit harmlessly on the mantelpiece and glare out at the unruly world with its glassy eyes.
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002147.php

Yes, I do have an indexable electronic version of the quick-ref rules-based classic hooked into my programs menu and ever ready to launch its little client in service of my silly squabbles and wagers. But Hatman is right. The old boys aren’t fallible. In fact, have become a little dated. And, correcting people’s speech outside of a classroom, especially when you understood what was meant to be understood, if damn sure missing the point. And probably just about as important to me as all those concessions, is the fact that Hatman said what he said well. I liked reading it. Who cares if we agree?

We do, but I think the point that hasn’t been made between the doomsdayers lamenting the uneducated condition of the very same youth we should be grooming now so that they’ll be prepared to carry on (i.e. torch at 90 degrees, slacks with an appropriate break over the shoe, et al(l)) when they’re dead and gone, still shaking their heads at the ruin all around them as my boys here order an anarchy burger with cheese and super sized fries, throw their feet up on the formica in a fashionably subtle and smooth nonchalence, and kick on back to cheer on the fast, incisive melody of the vandals going off half-cocked before them, whatever that means. Maybe it’s just too obvious to “waste words” on; because, of course you have to have some boundaries, a set of agreements, rules and regulations, and pre=cordoned realms of responsible rebellion–everything laid out in an incredibly granular and comprehensive social contract, all arrived at collaboratively. i.e. for the people, by the people…y, ya ahora, por y para la puebla.

But not by consensus, and that compells people to compaign for the right to determine the right, and the calling to conscienciously and comfortably correct los demas, despite the fact that the flowchart that governs the people’s congress–as capable of filling a mountainside vault as it might be–is also and equally as flexible…and/or accomodating…and/or…whatever.

Whether it’s all for naught, all for not, or all for knot, it just doesn’t make any difference. One of my bloggy boys fucking rocked it suave, which just happened to be the exact way it needed to be done this time. Che che checki tout:

Everyone is wrong, and only by recognizing our linguistic condition of original sin can we hope to atone for our wayward usage and get on the straight and narrow.

No, an iconograpic multi-national tax shelter that was a couple grand late to leave the Latin behind in order to complete the upgrade to the vulgar, that have stuck to their guns in order to keep the drafts and echoes as sharp as ever, whose flying buttresses have become flaming gargoyled priestestes thanking God for the thick, flowing, lo-drape Bath & Bombast work costumes they picked-up last year when the Priests in Pedophilia had their annual Pork ‘n’ Porno Pagaent–he remembers because that was the first one where they decided to invite the parents out, too. Everybody got a long real well, and pretty much since about that time was when Viagra become the sacrament of choice, and sacrilege finally melded into sacred once and for all–probably not the best road map for keeping a language vibrant.

But the David Koresh route probably wouldn’t be the very, very best way, either.

No stuffy, no sloppy. Don’t be slacker, don’t be so serious. Alliterate every once in a while. But, take it from me, you can really bug up some people fast fast before you can keep that up for too long. And here I’m being too long. It’s true; I just like to hear myself click.

Could there be a stupider word?

I’m aware of how possible it is that my little site isn’t much entertaining to anyone but me, but, really seriously now, it’s a good Bunyan step in that direction from the blahgbabbling this retired linguistics professor grafs up on the 1980s wallpaper with which he cobbles his site together, right?*

But, God? Please don’t let him come to do a trackback. Really don’t like hurting the people’s feelings. Boring stuff, but I’m glad he spins out the yarns that the little lingui fibers that itch him deserve to grow into.**

*The embedded prepositon there was only a stylistic move; it is a false and spurious notion that a sentence should not be terminate prepositionally. **In fact, it’s often aesthetically impossible to do so. FYI.