worded

I was an english major. Possibly the worst english major in the world as devoting YEARS of my young adult life to classic literature just never made sense. But my goal in life was to be a fact checker for Dennis Publications.

I married a vocabulary snob. I had to explain to my husband over lunch last week that feckless is not in the vernacular of his average peer. His argument was that they should have learned it by watching movies. I wanted to know what movies. His answer: British.

I work in a field where the combination of jargon, acronyms, and pejoratives could make your head explode. Do you know what a PCP is? Drug...? Doctor...? WRONG. It's Person Centered Planning. It is not uncommon to hear a house full of AARP eligible men referred to as boys. Watch how fast someone can lodge their foot in their throat by calling something retarded in front of the developmentally disabled. There seem to be two movements regarding words in the DMR. One is overly stuffy. These are not clients, consumers, boys, they are Indiviuals. The Individuals do not have tantrums, they exhibit socially inappropriate behaviors.

The other way is a more casual approach, towards which I lean. Replace Individuals with folks. I'm more likely to tell someone they are acting ridiculous than socially inappropriate. And I work with the guys and ladies.

I am a blog reader. Because you can't swing a cat without hitting a blog reader. I read Jezebel like it's the only internet on the tubes. And this came through today. So the initial problem was that Laura, of PR Season 3 fame, called her nannies "girls" in an interview. And maybe this makes me a bad feminist, or maybe just a product of my environment, but I didn't blink at it. It didn't even send a flare off in my brain that there was a problem. Or even that anyone would be offended by it.

Is it really that big a deal, or do people just need to lighten up?

I'd have flipped the second I had to say, "The engines are on fire."

I laughed really hard when air traffic was like, "We have runway one at teeterboro." And he was like, "We can't do that. We'll be in the Hudson." His completely flat affect struck me funny because I would have been screaming and convincing people to remove their seats for flotation devices.

This is in fact what he said....



I would have had a heart attack. "If you look out of the leftside of the plane, you will see a marvelous view of New York City. YOU MAY ALSO NOTICE(?!?!?!?) that the port engine is on fire."