Brief Pet Peeve

      One of these days, when time avails itself, I'll comprise a list of words I wish people would excise from their lazy vocabularies. But I guess that right now one of the ones I am most agonistic toward is the word "fabulous." I have no problem when people use the word with a cognizance of its etymology. But I loathe, hate, detest, scorn, eschew, the tendency to invoke "fab" or "fabulous" in vaporous contexts. Yes, I'm bilious toward the "Ab Fab" mentality. (Sorry, Anna, wherever you are.) Call it a bee in my fedoral bonnet. I guess it comes down to this, my own (perhaps cantankerous) peevishness with people using words when they know not at all what they mean. Like "true love." (As if there were a meaning for that abstraction.) Like abstraction, to whit I'd remind everyone to trahere the word. I suspect I'm just cranky, and at that stage again of niggling.

      But I suspect, too, it comes down to this: know what you say, and know what you intend to say, and don't use a vocabulary dissociatively. It cheapens language, and it cheapens thought. And it makes miserable ole buggers like me want to take you to task unnecessarily. Language may well be the greatest of human concoctions, and even the more-apparently provident technologies depend on a common notion of language, whether computerized, mathematized, physicisized, or poeticized.

      Precision is everything. Ruddy and as slippery as such precision might be, it deserves our effort. After all, we'd not forgive a doctor for cutting into "that thing" we thought was something else. Or, we might, if it still turned out okay; but if anything went even slightly off....