No. I am not communicating with owls, just miscellaneous rants for the season. I have been saving up a number of “pet peeves” to air out when everyone is in a better mood, comparatively speaking. Take a break from moaning and groaning about the prices and the crowds and the goods available and let me complain about something altogether immediately inconsequential to anyone but me until they are proven to be signs of the Apocalypse. Don’t say you have not been warned.
#1. What’s up with the letter (and the sound of) “T” ? It is a legitimate letter of the alphabet, classified as a “dental” sound, since it is made employing the tongue and the teeth. Lately, it is often being replaced by the sound of the letter “D”, as in “impordant”. Wrong! They’re related, of course, but the “D” is vocalized, that is, you can feel it in your throat. Try saying “tummy” and switch to “dummy”. See, you can feel it–different sound. And that’s not all. Way too often the “T” sound is being left out altogether in the middle OR at the end of words, sort of replaced by an apostrophe-sort-of stop, simply a cessation of sound, like there is no definite end of the word at all. No wonder so many people don’t do well with spelling, when what they are hearing is not what the word actually is. You will hear this from people who actually ought to know better, on-air personalities and such. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Tsk, tsk, tsk. If this continues, we’re going to sound like a bunch of Brits, and not even the Downton Abbey, upper-crust types either. I blame the Beatles and their ilk who made this manner of speech wildly popular at the time and it has just expanded over the years. Music can cover a wealth of vocal sins and this is one of them, in my book.
#2. And then there’s punctuation. I read the other day that an amazing number of communicators online feel that using any sort of punctuation online is rude. Rude!!?? Sorry about that but I have been being rude in virtually everything that I put on line…ever. Too many people apparently do not understand that punctuation is intended to clarify written communication. Oh, sure, there are some nit-picky (look up that word origin sometime)pedants who get carried away by semi-colons and such but it’s not all that complicated most of the time. As I would occasionally tell the seventh grade, “It’s all fun and games until a lawyer shows up and you’ve been written out of the inheritance.” Even under threat of being rude, I cannot write much of anything, online or otherwise, without punctuating it to the best of my ability. I have even been known to whip out my trusty magic marker and correct signs and advertisements in stores and official documents…I once caught a major mistake in a legal document, a will–mine, done by a pretty expensive legal office, which would have changed the intent of the whole thing; the cats don’t get it all now.
#3. How can kittens be so cute and so amazingly disruptive? More on this topic in Rants #4 ad infinitum. Stay tuned.
