Godammit, I’m Mad!

Now that Merriam-Webster has officially proclaimed that ‘ginormous’ is a word, I have even less regard for their dictionary.  ‘Ginormous’ is a horrible debacle as far as my ears are concerned. It also makes me think of ‘vagina,’ but I know I am overly sensitive to the V word. I don’t even like girls named Regina.

Anyway, what next, ‘kajillion?’ That one bothers me as well, but ‘eleventy billion’ is okay, because it’s so cute.

Allan Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, doesn’t like ‘ginormous.’ Here’s what he said about it:

“A new word that stands out and is ostentatious is going to sink like a lead balloon,” he said. “It might enjoy a fringe existence.”

Isn’t that an awful sentence?!  Why is this guy on the board of the American Dialect Society? No wonder everything is screwed up.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.