White Girl Blogging

White Girl Blogging

Thursday 19 January 2017

Words You Are Using Incorrectly

I've previously attempted to assist with the common grammatical crimes of your/you're and their/they're/there; so today I will focus on some other offenses oft committed but perhaps overlooked.

Words you are using wrong:

Selfie.  This is really only used incorrectly by people over the age of 50.  These people seem to think that a selfie is any photo taken on a mobile device.  A selfie is a photo you take of yourself, it's a self taken photo of one's self....hence selfie.  I cannot tell you how many times I've heard someone say "She got a selfie of him with her phone"....that's not possible- you cannot take a selfie of someone other than yourself.

Literally.  No, you did not literally die when you heard big news.  You are not literally incapable of handling the situation.  If you had done either of these, you'd either be physically dead or mentally insane; which you aren't, you're just a twat who doesn't know what 'literally' means.  What you want is the word 'figurative' if anything.

Awesome.  This means to inspire awe, actual awe; a feeling of such breathtaking a mind wrenching incomprehension and subjugation that you are taken to the brink of sanity by what you are experiencing and are reduced to your most basic animal mental state by the information.  So, is the sandwich you said was awesome really that good?  I doubt it.

Feminist- this is any person who believes that women deserve equal rights, pay, treatment to men.  That's it.  This can refer to a man or a woman who hold his belief.  This does not only refer to butch lesbians, to misandry spewing man-haters, to women who need to get laid, it refers to all people who believe in fighting discrimination based on sex.  We fight against stereotyping other groups such as all right-wingers are hillbilly bible-thumpers, all left-wingers are hippy drug addicts and all Americans are racist etc.  Yes, these extremes exist, but don't let the few bad apples sour the whole bunch.  The word you are looking for instead is 'feminazi'- the extremists of the group who are just the worst.

GIF vs JIF- The short form stands for 'graphic interchange format'. The word 'graphic' has a guttural 'gu' sound, not a hard 'j' or 'ʤ' sound as per phonetics.  The letter 'g' is pronounced differently based on the vowel that proceeds it; if it is followed by an 'i' or and 'e', then it takes on the 'j' or 'ʤ' sound; if it is proceeded by an 'a' and 'o' or a 'u', then it it pronounces as the softened 'gu' sound.  The exception to this is for Germanic words such as 'gift' and 'geese'.  Therefore, a Roman based language would say "Jif" and a Germanic  would pronounce is "Gif" with a soft 'g'.  As English is a combination of both....this means they are both right and both wrong and that there is no right answer.  Stop debating this online, it doesn't matter, look at cat videos like a normal person.


I'm sure one of these days one of my language professors will stumble across my language rants and will immediately have my degree revoked...but until then, keep reading!