Thursday, 17 July 2008
Not a trifling matter
Passive Aggressive Notes is one of my favourite blogs. A major reason for this is the frequent mangling of the English language by disgruntled passive-aggressors. Below is one of my favourite entries from October of last year.
Isn't that marvellous? The txt speak, the sentence formation, the vulgarity, the threat (and ass kicking will surely follow) and the remarkable sign-off all add up to comedy gold. I was most confused by the use of the word trifling. In the context of such extreme vehemence, trifling – defined by those Oxford blokes as "unimportant or trivial" – seemed misplaced. In fact, I spent a good couple of minutes trying to identify a possible malapropism, to no avail.
"But why bring this up now?" I hear you ask, "this post is the best part of a year old!".
I shall tell you for why. At the end of last month I twittered (yes, that's a verb now) a message asking other twitterers what they thought of a piece from guardian.co.uk on language evolution. The author, Paul MacInnes was lamenting what he views as the introduction of unnecessary words into the formal lexicon.
It appears that GrammarBlog twitter friend eris_chaos agrees with MacInnes, responding thusly.
I find that irritating. We are THAT much closer to trifling meaning "nasty" in the dictionary instead of "trivial".
And the penny drops. It's not a malapropism, it's a colloquialism. That's an altogether different kind of ism. Indeed the urban dictionary (shudder) carries the following definition.
When a hippo takes a big dump in front of a group of 1st graders and then eats it.
That's triflin'.
In response to the hungry hippo's action, Oh no, that's triflin'!
You learn something new everyday every day.
Rather than launch into indignant polemic, I thought I'd canvass opinion on this matter. So what do you lot reckon?
Labels: language, passive-aggressive notes, trifling, vocabulary
posted by Gez at 6:53 pm
21 Comments
Monday, 19 November 2007
You have no soul
Found on my current favourite blog, Passive Aggressive Notes, this example of a comma splice altering the meaning of a sentence is a lesson to all who use commas like confetti.
This is worse than your average splice as the comma unintentionally turns the phrase, 'you have no soul' into a subordinating clause. In other words – because of the people who use the bin for rubbish, the reader of the sign has no soul. I like to imagine a particularly forlorn student (possibly listening to My Chemical Romance or the Smiths) wandering past this notice and thinking, "So that's it; I knew someone was to blame."Brilliantly, a passing zealot spotted this error and resolved it with an act of grammar vigilantism.
Labels: comma, comma splice, funny, passive-aggressive notes, punctuation
posted by Gez at 12:28 pm
7 Comments
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Thanx
Found here.
If one is trying to politely but firmly get a point like this across, using a smiley or unnecessarily-cutesy text-speak comes across as very disingenuous, even passive-aggressive.
It really reminds be of one of my favourite blogs, Passive-aggressive notes. I don't know why they crack me up so much; maybe I can identify with pent-up frustration. I also like the last minute apostrophe in this photo – clearly an after thought but at least this person is trying.
Labels: passive-aggressive notes, photos, punctuation, spelling, text
posted by Gez at 3:47 pm
0 Comments
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