Oh Myyy! (9 page)

I do have my moments, too. My own “pet peeve” is with the recent misuse of the word “literally.” Young people are most apt to abuse this one. “I literally laughed my ass off.” Did you now? I see it on you still, so how did you somehow reattach it? “The test was literally the size of a phone book.” Now, which phone book was that, Monaco’s?

Friends, the word “literally” means just that. It actually is, was, or did. If you mean instead to be fanciful or colorful, you must choose another word, such as “figuratively.” Alternatively, you may choose none at all, and we’ll all know you’re being figurative. It’s perfectly fine to say, simply, “I laughed my ass off.” You can’t be figurative if you insist you are being literal.

I confess, I love English. I make every reasonable attempt to craft my public comments within the accepted confines and strictures of Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style
. The irony of this endeavor is palpable, for English itself is a hopeless hodgepodge of other tongues, with more exceptions than rules, more chaos than order, and enough new words created each day to keep the
Oxford English Dictionary
folks very, very busy.

Recently, I began seeing a great number of new words used by fans in their wall posts and comments. I thought to myself, why not see if we can bend the rules a bit more and create some new and interesting vocabulary? So I held a “new word” contest among fans, asking them to submit not only the proposed new word, but a definition and an example of how the word would be used in context. To my delight, I received over five thousand submissions!

The winning entry, voted upon by the fans themselves, was this gem:

Source Credit: Michael Whittemore. Used with Permission.

Republican fans were quick to amend the meme to reflect their exhaustipation with the Democrats. The close runners-up deserve mention here as well:

Source Credit: Brandi Collins. Used with Permission.

Source Credit: Chris Parkes. Used with Permission.

I was tickled to learn that the good folks at the Oxford Dictionaries actually took interest in the contest and posted about it on their site:

“HERE AT OXFORD DICTIONARIES WE’RE ALWAYS MONITORING NEW WORDS AND MEANINGS FOR INCLUSION IN OUR DICTIONARIES: ONCE A WORD OR PHRASE HAS GAINED ENOUGH TRACTION, AND WE’VE RECORDED ENOUGH EVIDENCE OF ITS USAGE, WE USE OUR LANGUAGE RESEARCH TO CREATE ACCURATE DEFINITIONS.

IN TODAY’S SOCIAL, VIRTUAL, VIRAL WORLD WE’VE SEEN HOW QUICKLY NEW COINAGES AND USAGES CAN SPREAD, SO WE’RE WATCHING WITH INTEREST AS TAKEI’S FANS SUBMIT NEW WORDS IN THEIR THOUSANDS.”

Oh myyy. I believe I had what they call a “nerdgasm.” I hope that word has made it in, too.

So Grammar Nazis be warned: For each rule and principle you cling to with your fierce, unyielding, and yes, admirable determination, new and dynamic forces are at work that inevitably will undermine your efforts. Antecedents will dangle, prepositions will complete sentences, and infinitives will be split.

After all, it is our continuing mission “to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Chairman Meow

Somewhere along the way to the digital age, somebody decided that cats conjugate improperly when speaking English, plot the end of the human race, and love to eat cheeseburgers. For some other mysterious reason, these assumptions stuck, and a new breed of cat memes and videos made their way onto the Interweb.

I do love cats, and I actually have three. They are outdoor cats, and we’ve named them Fluffy, Ginger and Evil Eyes. Evil eyes is so named because his eyes have that preternatural glow to them that only certain cats can boast. They are semi-feral creatures who live happily in our yard. Here I am feeding them. They’re refusing, as cats will, to look at the camera as directed.

As much as I adore cats, my fans love them more. Factoid: There are some 86.4 million pet cats in the United States alone. This in part explains the success of the musical
Cats
(it certainly wasn’t the nonexistent plot). Whenever I post an image with a cat in it, I can count on a baseline of tens of thousands of “likes” and “shares.” Even if the cat is really ugly.

You probably know that some of the most popular videos on YouTube are cat videos. If you haven’t seen the “Ninja” cat and the “Patty Cake” cats, you aren’t very good at surfing the Net. There are even YouTube videos about how popular cats are on YouTube — including a hilarious one on “catvertising” that makes this very point.

© eldeiv - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission.

I’ve lately asked myself why we are so fascinated by cats. Much of the attraction derives from their highly human-like expressions and the rich variation in their size, color and, often, girth. We see our own exploits, frustrations, and failures in their eyes and their efforts. By contrast, dogs are commonly portrayed as “one-note” creatures that have more unconditional, simpler expressions. It also may explain why there is no musical called
Dogs
.

Take, for example, this picture:

Now, imagine an all-feline version of
Lord of the Rings
, and you can easily see this fellow in the role of Gandalf.