theadamglass:

litreactor:

10. Bromance

Origin: A portmanteau of the words brother and romance, created in the 1990s by Dave Carnie (editor of the skateboard magazine Big Brother) to describe the relationships that develop between male skaters.

Why it sucks: The word bromance exists so two guys can be friends…

At the sake of alienating a lot of people, and doing whatever the opposite of alienating is for some others, I’m going to defend these words from this prescriptivist ranting. The words serve a useful meaning to the people who use them, and whether or not you choose to use them yourself doesn’t make those who do wrong.

10. Bromance.

This is one of the few valid arguments the author makes. There’s no need for this word, because, well, we should be able to have male friends without having to caveat it away from homosexual intimacy. It’s dumb. Portmanteaus are dumb, yes, but they’re also a perfectly reasonable way to create new words, and the only reason the author stands against bromance and other portmanteaus is that they are neologisms. Language changes, like it or not. Is bromance needless? No, it’s not. It gets used because someone feels the need to use it. Are the reasons for wanting to use it usually really dumb? Yes. Not wanting to appear to be gay is a terrible reason to use or not use a word. But the morality and values of a specific group (no matter how large that group is) don’t define general language use.

9. Man-cave.

While man-cave no doubt exists as a marketing ploy, and a vaguely misogynistic one at that, it is nothing more than modern sensibilities applied to the word den. What is a den? It’s either a home for animals or a room in a house where, traditionally, men gathered. What is a man-cave? (see “Den”).

8. Awesomesauce.

I commend people for diluting the word awesome into awesomesauce for the exact same reason the author attacks it. The universe is awesome. My nachos were awesomesauce. That is to say, they were good, but not good enough to use the word Awesome to describe them, since traditionally that words been reserved for describing God. You want to attack a neologism for what it is? Take a step back. Using awesome in everyday conversation is already American slang far removed from the original meaning of the word. Awesomesauce actually fixes a problem.

7. Foodie.

People define themselves into groups and label themselves in a form of tribalism. It’s often pretentious, yes, and generally designed to make the in-crowd feel better than the outsiders. Again, the motivations for this word may not be what would motivate others to make a word, but it serves a purpose to those who use it, and it conveys meaning to those who hear it.

6. Irregardless.

One of the few pet peeves I have is an insistence that anything is “not a word”. It’s being used. The moment it is written or pronounced it becomes a word. It may still be nonsense, but it is a word.

Anyway, my main defense of irregardless has always been that the people attacking it routinely use flammable, a word that has as much meaning and comes from a similar, if reversed, etymological strain. Inflammable is a word that mean able to be caught on fire. Flammable means the same thing because someone thought the “in-” meant “non”, or at least worried that the general public would confuse the two. People use flammable in place or inflammable; people use irregardless in place of regardless.

5. Fail.

It’s shorthand. You know what someone means when they say “fail”. It’s quicker than saying “That was a terrible thing to have done, mate. you look right foolish now.”

4. Nom.

A (relatively small percentage of) generation of people raised by Sesame Street use a word derived from the onomatopoeic phrase of a popular character? Perish the thought. Culture affects words. Would this guy have attacked people for taking up Shakespeare’s use of “fashionable” or Chaucer’s “halfway” or Wycliffe’s “arse-ropes” which sadly didn’t catch on as a term for intestines, but thank goodness some version of the Bible contains it?

It sounds like babytalk? All neologisms and onomatopoeia are nonsense until they gain wider use.

3. Totes.

Again, we can’t really attack slang just because we choose to hold ourselves to a higher linguistic standard. Will “totes” eventually become the post-modern English standard for “totally”? Maybe. Does it matter? No. It’s derivation, just like “totally” has replaced the Latin “totus”.

2. Winning.

I’m not sure why this one even sucks beyond the author not liking the man who popularized it’s use. Though the author clearly doesn’t either.

1. LOL.

I could right a big long impassioned defense of LOL, but thankfully my fingers can be saved thanks to one of my favorite people on the whole earth, David Mitchell. Watch the video, but to summarize, LOL actually serves a purpose, especially in writing in the digital age. It conveys meaning in a concise way that doesn’t exist otherwise.