These words bug me:
1) Veggies. Why can't we say vegetables? Do we have to give this a cutesy word like veggies? This one is so common that it's less annoying than the next three, somehow...
2) Cardi. Really? Cardi? You can't say cardigan, which is a perfectly good already existing word? Again, too cutesy.
3) Lil. Or lil'. Come on. Do we really need to talk like we're a member of the Little Rascals? It is not that hard to type out little.
4) Prolly. Ugh. This is the worst one of all. If you're typing "prolly", you either don't know how to spell probably, or you've decided to acquire an affectation that makes you sound like a 6-year old girl. With a maturity level to match.
I'd be hard pressed to think of a full grown man who would use these words. Maybe veggies is starting to sneak its way into the common vernacular, but I doubt most men would say "cardi".
I have noticed that I have a lot of writing pet peeves. It's kind of a losing battle, too. Every year I make the same speeches about them to my grad students (we don't write "people that...", it's "people who...") but it doesn't make much of a difference. They do it anyway, and some of them even do it on purpose occasionally just to bug me (ahem, "impact"). It's funny that I care about these things since I break so many writing and grammatical rules myself. So I guess I'm being pretty hypocritical. I've probably acquired these peeves because I have to read so many flipping drafts of theses, prelims, proposals, and dissertations, oh my. Reading student drafts is much, much more exhausting than reading published work. Amen.
But at least none of my students ever use the words veggies, cardi, lil, or prolly in their drafts. So it could be worse!
2 comments:
I have a couple thoughts/questions...
(a) Why does it matter, in particular, what language a grown man would use?
(b) I consider myself a grownup and I could easily see myself using
"veggies". I don't know about "cardi" because I rarely use the word "cardigan".
(c) How do you feel about leaving the punctuation outside of the quotation marks as I did in (b)? As far as I understand it you're not supposed to do that (except in some cases involving questions) but I think it's much more logical to leave the punctuation outside of the quotes.
(d) I think I would put "veggies" and "cardi" in a different category (shortening words) than "lil" and "prolly" (corrupting words), but I'm sure that's just my personal preference--and I think there could potentially be some racialized aspects to my viewing those words (especially "prolly") as a "corruption" while I just view the others as "shortenings".
-Matt
(a) So the man thing is something I've been thinking about for a few weeks, ever since I heard a parenting podcast with two women (moms) and a researcher (also a woman). The information was great, but I almost couldn't bear to listen to it because there was so much silly laughter, lilting tones of voices, flirtatious joking around, and just a tone to it that struck me as infantile. I found myself wondering what it'd be like to hear that way of talking on, say, Talk of the Nation with Neil Conan and his male guests and realized men would never, ever talk like that in a million years, because it would be bizarre and nobody would take them seriously. This had me wondering about the ways in which adult women sort of sabotage themselves (I was especially thinking about the researcher, who I couldn't take seriously due to the way she was talking). When I ask myself, "would a grown man talk/write/act that way?" and find the answer to be no, I realize, I shouldn't either.
b) Yeah, veggies has become pretty common. Most men would probably just say sweater.
c) I think it's more logical to put the punctuation outside, too. I put it inside for writing papers, but I wonder, is there a difference between having a whole phrase versus just a word? I thought if it was just one word, then it was okay to put the punctuation outside, but I could be wrong about that.
I don't know what to say about (d) per se. I think what bothers me about the whole thing is how gendered it is. It feels like otherwise more or less intelligent women are sabotaging themselves by writing and talking in these infantilizing ways.
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