Vacay, etc.

The other day, a good friend replied to a meme-question on Facebook, something like this: WHAT POPULAR WORD OR EXPRESSION DO YOU NOT LIKE?

“Vacay,” he answered.

That one doesn’t really bother me much, probably because I don’t hear it all that often.

Others do.

Rents, for example, annoys me. Short for parents. I’m not sure why; I guess it just seems (to a grumpy old parent like me) a bit ... dismissive?

Adulting I find kind of amusing—as if it’s something you can elect to do part-time later on. I think that’s probably true. I’ve known a lot of adults (sometimes me!) who act so only occasionally.

Of course, there are those shorthand expressions we use on social media, expressions that have migrated into our speech and writing: LOL, WTF, OMG, etc.

I think about how my mother would have reacted to these invasions of the language she loved. A longtime English teacher, she disdained all of the new terms that I was using in childhood and adolescence—even something as innocuous as cool. For Mom, language was frozen, stored in the freezer, thawed, and used only traditionally. (She corrected me continually.)

And I kind of understand. I don’t like some of what I hear and read these days:

• All right and alright used interchangeably.
• Using one another to refer to two people (instead of each other).
• There are countless others.

But, as I said, language is not frozen. It’s changing all the time, and there’s not a thing we can do about it except rage, rage against the dying of the light, if we so choose.

The difference between who and whom is evanescing.

The difference between will and shall.

The uses of apostrophes.

The uses of semicolons.

And on and on.

But remember: We made all of this up; English has been evolving for a long, long time.

Dickens, for example, used semicolons in ways that I was taught were “wrong.”  Em dashes, too.

Emily Dickinson’s dashes and hyphens and whatevers are a sight to behold.

It’s common now to hear young people say (and write) I graduated college instead of I graduated from college.

And on and on it goes—just as it has ever gone—and just as it ever will.