Can Email Be Far Behind

One of my colleagues at work and I had a friendly, ongoing difference of opinion. I said, “Web site,” and she said, “website.” Every time we’d edit work for each other, I would correct her “website” and she would mark my “Web site.” And I would say, “I follow the Associated Press Stylebook (dubbed the Journalist's 'Bible').” To which she’d reply, “It’s website.”

Well, in case you are not a language nerd (credit Washington Post writer Rob Pegoraro with that term), you might have missed the hoopla over the AP’s decision a couple of weeks ago to change to “website.” Faster Forward writer Pegoraro wrote, “My instinctive reaction is to stick with traditional practice, but I'm not completely sure what to think.”

A couple of days after I read the news about the switch, I printed out a post about the change and left a copy on my colleague’s desk with a note: “I guess I’ll be changing to website.” However, I didn’t say she was right. Or that I liked it.

Poynter has a good post on the topic.

Mind-Boggling

(Peggy is crying after losing a game of Boggle)
Hank: You’re smarter than anyone in Arlen.
Peggy: Well, woopty-doo, I’m the smartest hick in hick town.

I think Peggy Hill is on to something. Remember Peggy? King of the Hill mom and Boggle player extraordinaire, Peggy is one of my favorite animated TV moms. Of course, with two sons who were fond of Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead when they were growing up, it’s only fitting that I’d like Judge’s Peggy—not that I identify with her. After all, I’ve never been the Boggle Champion of Texas.

Peggy came to mind as we have been playing Boggle lately, and I have been bested all too frequently. And then I discovered a non-intimidating time waster online. You can play interactive Boggle.

Seems I remembered reading that working with words improves mental functioning. Although I refuse to join AARP, I do occasionally look at their Web site, where I recently found 10 steps to an optimal memory. Number two right after exercise was “Keep Learning.” And evidentally, playing games like Boggle and Scrabble counts toward improving memory.

So, I guess the few minutes I spent on interactive Boggle was actually time well spent. Ah heck, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Short & Sweet Thursday

Let us rid our vocabularies of:

Went missing (disappeared)

Passed away (died)

Resigned under pressure (fired)

Have some more nominees? Let's hear them.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

I think Republican presidential contenders have been reading a little too much Uncle Remus. First, it was Mitt Romney apologizing for calling the Big Dig construction project in Boston a “tar baby,” and now, poor old John McCain has fallen down into a tar pit himself when using the “tar baby” language. While both used “tar baby” to refer to a difficult problem that is aggravated by attempts to solve it, it can also be used as a derogatory term for a black person and that’s reason enough to avoid it altogether especially if you want to be President and you are a white guy.

Hey You Guys

I never thought we Southerners were ahead of the curve, but I think our use of “y’all” definitely fits the bill. Over at In These Times I noticed an article entitled “A Politically Correct Lexicon, Your ‘how-to’ guide to avoid offending anyone.” In the piece, Joel Bleifuss gives readers an up-to-date lowdown on the ever-changing world of what you can safely call various groups and categories of folks. Don’t you like how generic “folks” is?

I latched onto “guys” because if folks would adopt the non-sexist Southern “y’all,” we wouldn’t have to think much about it. Bleifuss says,

Guys: Very controversial. Used, especially in the Midwest, when referring to a group of people. “In Chicago that word gets used a lot,” says Hill. And Baim says, “I use it all of the time.” Some feminists, like Andi Zeisler, the editor of Bitch, find “guys” problematic. “We assume the descriptor ‘guys’ denotes a quality of universality,” she says. “It would be hard to imagine a group of men being addressed by their server as ‘hey you gals’ and not taking offense, but the reverse happens all the time.”

And while I had already noticed, it’s now okay to call Indians “Indians” instead of Native Americans. Bleifuss has this to say about the use of Native American:

Native American: Some Indians object to the term, seeing it as a way to linguistically eradicate “Indian” and thus the history of their oppression by whites. “I almost always hear Native American, and in the more enlightened conversations there is usually ‘indigenous’ thrown in there somewhere,” says Lott. Sen says, “Native American seems to be a more distant construction, developed by academics.”