Sawn Off Words Which Have Replaced the Originals!  

Or "shot to death" or "stabbed to death" Again...the point of the news story was that the person died, is it really necessary to point out that they were stabbed to death? Unless of course the burglar was stabbed 47 times, crawled to the neighbor's house where the neighbor proceeded to shoot....then shot to death might be valid information.

When it is said on the news that "He was shot dead", it leaves me wondering if they shot the person and he died, or did they shoot him when he was already dead?

Sorry for the delay in answering--got very busy & waylaid by "Real Life" lately!

Yes--metamorphosis is the term I was trying to recall. Thanks!

"Shot dead," "past history," "free gift," & my favorite to hate, "close personal friend of mine," are all under the heading of "The Department of Redundancy Department." Off topic, but always fun to consider...

It doesn't matter what the clock says; my mind is always on the "odd side." LOL!

Xmas is not quite in the same category as the rest of your nice list, as it was begun as a way of honoring Christ. Many assume it is used for the exact opposite reason, thinking the "X" is for "x-ing" Christ out of Christmas, but it was started centuries ago, to connect the "sacrifice" Christ made by coming to Earth, & living in the same pain as the rest of us, then dying on the Cross--which is what the "X" stands for!

LOL! Linguine! Good one!

Maggiepie
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral & religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams

Crimson--Oh, you know...with the news media, if it bleeds, it leads.

Maggiepie
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral & religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams

Just by the way, over the past few days, a few more shorties popped into my head. To wit:

TEMP(erature)
TEMP(orary)
PHOTO(graph)
ILLO (printer's term for "illustration")
SLO(w)MO(tion)
COR(rection)FLU(id) (another printer's term)
MAX(imum)
(in)FLU(enza)
PREP(paration)
PREP(peratory school)
SIB(ling)
PANT(aloons)S
SEC(ond)

There were others, but I didn't always have a scrap of paper handy. I'm sure there are scads more. Thanks for posting!

And Thanks for all the fun, guys!

Merry Christmas!

Maggiepie
"I pray to heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that hereafter inhabit it." --Carved into the stone fireplace in the White House Dining Room, under President John Adams

i agree that eddy for an email sounds dreadful - the word eddy already exists though so with any luck this will not happen.

Lab is also now for LABor?? How to gum up the works even worse!

Semi for houses? I've heard of "semi-detached, though I'm not clear on what that means. The term "diss" for showing disrespect is actually from a misuse of the term, to begin with. "Disrespect" is not a verb (though at the rate it's being misused, it could well become one). One should not be able to say, "He disrespected me." Rather, "He showed me disrespect."

Yes, I knew about cigs & cigaret, & the dropping the "et" irritates me as there is no point in keeping any part of the phony French ending if one misspells it! One doesn't see "dinet set," after all! Just go back to calling them little cigars, once the phony French ending is gone. Or wait--how about mini-cig? (Cigs would then be used only for cigars)

"Fagg0tt"--which originally meant a small bundle of twigs used for kindling--is still in my lexicon, but I dislike in the extreme the disgusting obscenity for which it's used today, whether in its full form or the shortened version. It should die altogether; what an ugly word.

"Porkie?" Unfamiliar to me. "Loo" I knew--though not its longer form, which I assume it has, yes? And here, we spell plebeian "plebe."

"Addy is well in place, whereas "eddy," as short for e-mail address (& you must admit, that begs to be lopped short!) is still on the rise. Can you come up withe a better short term than eddy? Cute--"for the 'mo"...bet you thought I didn't catch that, didn't you! Hee!

That's it for now! Double cents day just ended, but I still want to polish off the rest of the posts here! Thanks for the post!

Maggiepie
"I pray to heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that hereafter inhabit it." --Carved into the stone fireplace in the White House Dining Room, under President John Adams

you don't like abs?

Only flat, hard ones in combination with pecs....

i thought you didn't like abbreviations and here you are sounding very fond of abs and pecs

It was the abs that set me off...

To me, it's a matter of how it sounds in my ear...the poetry of a word. Some I prefer full length, others I'm happy to shorten. Still, even though I use info for information, & bus instead of omnibus, there was a sort of stately dignity in the longer forms. They were enjoyed for their ability to roll sonorously off the tongue, in a simpler, less hectic world.

Maggiepie
"I pray to heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that hereafter inhabit it." --Carved into the stone fireplace in the White House Dining Room, under President John Adams

MOOBS

Man Boobs

get your own box pal.

never mind, it was a good addition - but doesn't it already exist?

Lamby, how many times do you have to be told they are man boobs.

Yes, the donut/doughnut bothers me, as well. I wonder myself when "maintainance" mutated! My spell check confused me, insisting it was wrong! (At least it doesn't accept donut! Yet...)

T.P. was begun, I'm pretty sure, as a prudish attempt to avoid using the entire term in case anyone glanced at your shopping list & was shocked--SHOCKED--that people had bodily functions! Think of it as "proto-texting." Incidentally, the very word "texting" sounds so wrong, to me; when exactly did "text" become a verb...?

Ha! I love it! "Morphing" into a pillar of salt! That's priceless!

Maggiepie
"I pray to heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that hereafter inhabit it." --Carved into the stone fireplace in the White House Dining Room, under President John Adams

Thank you very much for best response. I had fun reading your response. Yeah, when someone sent that to me, I got a kick out of it. I love it when kids give their version of things. Thanks again and take care.

I wouldn't have a problem with "text-speak" if it stayed on cell phones, but now, kids are turning in papers in classes using it as if it were the lingua franca! Teachers who let them do it should be drawn & quartered. Same thing goes for "teachers" of math who let students use calculators! Their graduates are the ones manning cash registers with no numbers on the buttons--just pictures of the food they sell!

The mind boggles.

I also wonder about the DJ & MC thing. I think why it might be happening (though it's still dumb) is because writers think they need to spell out the phonetically-spelled words, because it is in written form, rather than spoken. But it's silly because it's not that much more trouble to spell out the original terms, & the initials were instituted to save time! Master of Ceremonies & Disc Jockey are not that much longer! We're getting so lazy....

I still spell it cigarette, too..even though I used to rail against the adding of French endings to English words, because it was only a form of verbal elitism. There used to be this notion (especially in the 1950s U.S.) that French was the end-all, be-all of everything sophisticated, & that mere English was somehow square & not cool. I always hated that snobbish attitude.

Thanks for posting!

Maggiepie
"I pray to heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that hereafter inhabit it." --Carved into the stone fireplace in the White House Dining Room, under President John Adams