3 Words I Want to Go Away

I have ranted about words before. But I cannot say it enough – we need to stop making nouns into verbs.

We don’t dialog with one another, we converse. I’m not efforting a story, I’m looking into the allegations (or whatever it is I could be working on). And I most certainly don’t office from my home!

When I hear people use such words or read articles with them, my opinion of them/it plummets. And even though I have been known to use text as a verb, I cringe every time. I usually try to use it properly in a sentence but it is easy to get caught up in the madness. Don’t text me – send me a text message. Yes, it’s two more words, the horror, but it sounds so much more intelligent.

We need to nip this practice in the bud! Please, say you’re with me on this. Say you’ll stop and use perfectly good verbs and leave the nouns alone! Let them do the job they were meant to do.

In a similar vein, Terry Starbucker did a post on “no nonsense communication.” I’m in his corner. I especially liked the point about negation words. When you think about it, how often do you like to hear the word but?

“I really like you, but…”
“I’d love to hire you, but…”
“Go ahead and eat that ice cream cone, but…”

It’s usually followed by something we’d rather not hear.

I also appreciated his point about absolutes. Most of life is not absolute. I think my dislike of absolutes can also be tracked back to my ‘live in the now’ personality. I know things will change, I expect them to change. Never say never are very wise words. It seems like as soon as I make an absolute statement, something changes to make it false.

In the end, I think we just need to treat words with a little more respect.

Hey, today is day 15 in the 30-day blogging challenge. Woo Hoo!! I’ve made it half way. There’s no turning back, now. Not that there ever was.