Pondering the world

10 words to avoid when writing

Precise Edit ("providing clarity and grace for your writing") says one shouldn't use these words when writing:

really, you, used to, a lot, feel, think, sort of/kind of, like, just, as

But wait.  Most of my writing is on this blog, which is conversational, like I'm telling you about what's going on in my life, if you even care.  And those are some of my favorite words.

So now I feel like just as I'm kind of getting into the habit of writing something for you every day, someone comes along and tells me that a lot of my favorite words are bad writing.  I really think I'm getting better since I write more than I used to.

Did I get them all?

no wirty dirds here

I recently had a conversation with a couple at breakfast.  Nice people, but boy, was he a straight arrow.  He couldn't even bring himself to say "Democrat," being a staunch Republican.  His phrase was "person of the other political persuasion."

We talked about what we've all done in our lives.  For a long time he was a college professor and over the summer breaks he would work as a private investigator and process server for an attorney friend.  He told an interesting story about a woman who was particularly difficult to serve and how he finally managed to do it by tricking her--he showed up at her front door on her birthday with a "flower delivery."  She was really mad at him, and he said as he was walking away she called him a "wirty dird."

Holy cow!  He had a euphemism for a euphemism!

I spent four years in the Army acquiring some very colorful language and the next 30 years trying to clean it up.  I can probably make a good guess at what she called him.

hadda and gotta

We hear lots of interesting conversations at breakfast because we're in the kitchen, right around the corner from the dining room, so we can hear what our guests are saying.

I recognized something new about regional language this week as I listened to a guest from the Midwest.  It was about the way she used "gotta" and "hadda."

Until now, my experience with "gotta" is that most people use it with a verb, like "I gotta go" or "there are lots of things I gotta do that I don't want to."  She put a whole different twist on it by saying "I gotta jar of red chile jam at that store" and "I gotta picture of that."  Eh?

Even more interesting was her use of "hadda," which, now that I think about it, I don't ever say.  She used it both in the verb form ("I hadda use the ladies room," i.e., "had to") and as the possessive verb ("I hadda really bad headache," i.e., "had a").

I hadn't really noticed how people use those phrases before, but since she said them constantly, they started standing right out.

It took me a while, but I hadda learn this for myself.  Gotta go.

somebody was mad at him

Yesterday I was driving behind a beat-up pickup truck, and it looked like he had really ticked someone off.  The message scrawled on his rear bumper said:

"Morther F***/U/What...."   (yep, this is exactly as it was written)

translation:  "Mother f*** you wait..."

I wonder if his aim is any better than his spelling and grammar.

no verbs for you!

You know how the flight crews on Southwest airlines have a reputation for being fun people and doing interesting things?  I actually get disappointed when they stick to the straight, serious script about emergency exits and all that.  I'm not sure this guy realized he committed a malapropism.

On our return flight to Albuquerque, the head attendant was making an announcement about the serving cart coming through and asked us not to "conjugate" in the aisle.

mangled language

Today I met a guy walking his dogs near our place, and they had stopped for a drink by the fountain.  He had two Brittany spaniels on a tandem lead, mom and a pup a few months old.  Of course, Mama came over to be petted, dragging the puppy a bit since he was attached to her.  He wasn't so eager about going over to meet strangers.

The guy said, "oh, she loves to be petted, but he's definitely skittery-ish-er."

What?

I know he was trying to say  "more skittish," but that was mangled pretty badly.  The older I get, the more people I meet who don't have even a passing decent vocabulary and make a total hash out of their native English.

Of course, look at the role models we have.  Go ahead, blame Dub-yuh.  He's good for it. 

out of context--"mas fuerte que nunca"

Several weeks ago I saw a bus with an ad on the side and in big letters it said "mas fuerte que nunca."  I didn't catch any of the rest of it.

I used what little Spanish I know to piece it together:  mas means "more" or "better;" I don't know what "fuerte" means; que nunca is "than never."  I cobbled together that it must mean "better late than never."  Sounds like a fair assumption, right?

However, in the online Spanish dictionary "fuerte" has a number of meanings:  bouncing, hefty, loud, lusty, strapping, strong--you get the picture. 

Now I'll be looking for that bus with that ad to see the other stuff on the side, like pictures or additional information to see if I can figure out what it means.  Look how often our advertising in English involves a play on words or a pun.  I'm sure they do the same in Spanish.  It's all in the context.

I'm still learning as I get older, and one of things I've learned is that you can't just pick up a dictionary, learn a bunch of words and some grammar and say you know the language.  That's just the beginning.

Doesn't all bread come from an oven?

On Christmas Eve we visited our friend Bette at her shop in Old Town, and she gave us a round loaf of oven bread.  One of her Navajo friends had given her three loaves, way more than she could eat in a couple of days.

A couple of days later I was in the kitchen contemplating having some of this oven bread with leftover soup for lunch, and my random thought--you know, the kind you have when you're not really using your brain to think--was "why do they call it oven bread?  Where else is bread going to come from?"

That's a dumb question, at least in this part of the world.  The other type of bread is "fry bread."  Yep, you heard right.  Those are the two basic types of Navajo bread, and it goes way back, hence the simplistic nature of the naming.  Oven bread is a round loaf that uses yeast and rises in an oven, as opposed to fry bread (non-yeast) which is more like a flat flour tortilla that is deep-fried and puffs up.  Besides just being good to eat (isn't anything deep-fried?), they fold it around meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and all those other fixings to make "Navajo tacos."  Yummy.

So when you think about the two basic types of bread that they made a hundred years ago and add the language barrier on top of it, it's not surprising that it's been reduced to its most basic concept.  Fry bread vs. oven bread.  Simple, right? 

Sometimes I make things more difficult than they really are.

the "citos" of New Mexico

As we were driving up I-25, we passed a car with "Los Suavecitos en Los Lunas" in big white letters on the back window.  If you know about "low riders" in the Southwest, you can picture the car--an old Monte Carlo or Cadillac, snazzy paint job, low to the ground, fake fur on the dash, etc., and generally with a 20-something guy driving it.

I speculated about what Los Suavecitos meant.  I don't know that much Spanish but I know that "cito" on the end of a word makes it a diminutive, "little" something or other.  Little suave guys?  A gang from Los Lunas?  Undoubtedly.  I giggled at why guys would put a diminutive on their gang name.  Little suave guys.  That's right up there with calling yourself a MACHOcito.  Little macho guy.  Doesn't really go together. 

Later, after we came out of Lowe's and saw a young Hispanic guy sitting in the back of the car looking bored, obviously waiting for someone to come out and drive home, I put on my best redneck accent and said, "Yew just wait out cheer in the car, Bubba."

Wait, that would be "Bubbacito."