Puerto Rico Needs Your Help! Here's How
United
for Puerto Rico (spearheaded by the First Lady of Puerto Rico)
Former
U.S. presidents have expanded their One America Appeal to include recovery
efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands
Save the Children, which focuses
specifically on the needs of families and their children.
Global Giving has a $2 million goal for
victims of Hurricane Maria
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Totally
Overworked Words
by Richard Nordquist via thoughtco.com
Updated December 04, 2017
Intensifiers and qualifiers really aren't bad words, not at all. Indeed, because they're
so brutally overworked, you might actually say they deserve our sympathy.
Why, there's one now: actually. Ernest
Gowers once dismissed this "noise" as a "meaningless word"
(A Dictionary of Modern English Usage). Actually the word itself isn't
meaningless, but when used habitually as verbal filler it rarely adds much to the
meaning of a sentence.
Here are a few more awesome words that truly deserve a rest.
Absolutely
It's a fact: the word absolutely has replaced yes
as the most common way of expressing affirmation in English. And not just in American English. A few years back, in a
column written for The Guardian newspaper in England, Zoe Williams
encouraged a ban on the reiterated absolutely:
[P]eople
use it to signify agreement. I'll be more precise: when they are agreeing with
their friends, they just go "yeah." But when they are playing a game,
be it on the telly, the radio, or simply an arguing-game around a domestic
table, they suddenly start saying "absolutely." This is fine on the
face of it, but I've listened to Radio 4 a lot now, and realized that this usage
entails an obligatory repetition. They never just go "absolutely,"
the buffers. They go "absolutely, absolutely, absolutely,
absolutely." No word needs saying four times in a row. Not even a swear word.
What's hard to understand is why the simple and emphatic yes
has been supplanted by this multisyllabic adverb.
Basically
Though not nearly as annoying as the ubiquitous expressions
"just sayin'" and "bottom line," basically is
basically an empty qualifier. In The English Language: A User's Guide,
Jack Lynch calls it "the written equivalent of 'Um.'"
Awesome
Not long ago, Canadian humorist Arthur Black wrote an
awesome column on the devaluation of an adjective that used to refer to something
that inspired awe—the aurora borealis, for instance, or the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius, or the Supreme Being.
A
grand word, awesome, and it has served us well. But somewhere along the
way the word mutated, morphed and bloated into semantic meaninglessness.
This morning in a coffee shop I said “I’ll have a medium coffee, black, please.” “Awesome,” the barista said. No. No, that’s not awesome. As cups of coffee go, it turned out to be not half bad, but "okay" is several light years from "awesome." Over the past little while I’ve been informed by, or overheard people affirming that: they’ve purchased an awesome T-shirt, watched an awesome commercial; eaten an awesome hamburger; and met an awesome real estate agent. I’d like to believe that all these experiences were as jaw-droppingly life-altering as the adjective "awesome" implies. But somehow I doubt it. ("Dropping the A-word." The NEWS, June 24, 2014. Rpt. in Paint the Town Black by Arthur Black. Harbour Publishing, 2015)
Linguists tell us that over the past few
decades the word awesome has experienced something called semantic shift.
But that doesn't mean we have to like it.
Very
This one has been inflating student essays for a very
long time. Bryan Garner, author of Garner's Modern American Usage
(2009), categorizes very as a weasel
word:
This
intensifier, which functions as both an adjective and an adverb, surfaces
repeatedly in flabby writing. In almost every context in which it appears, its
omission would result in at most a negligible loss. And in many contexts the
idea would be more powerfully expressed without it.
Obviously. And I mean totally.
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