Or, The Poorly-edited Blogstress Bitches About Others
ENTITLED. Guess what? Your story is not “entitled” anything, or to anything. It is TITLED. Stop being FANCY, ya fuckin fancypants. Yeah, I’m talking to YOU, NPR.
Correct: “I am entitled to more pie.”
Correct: “My book is titled, Give Me Some Pie Or I Will Garotte You.”
WHAT THE FUUUUCK?: “This pie is entitled Boston Creme.”
UTILIZE. I know it’s a damn word. Don’t care. Utilize the word “use,” instead. Unless you want people to think you’re an engineer. Do you want people to think you’re an engineer? Then I can’t help you. If you do want help…well, dropping “utilize” from your vocabulary is only one thing on a list of long things you need to do to hide your true identity.
But don’t worry, some people think engineers are hot? Peut-etre?
(ETA: Oh wait, never mind. I just assumed that googling “hot engineers” would turn up a calendar or engineer pron or something. My bads. Engineers, drop the u-bomb all you want.)
AND MYSELF. Just no. The only time this is acceptable is if you are some kind of mafiosio hoity-toitily threatening someone in a nice restaurant with the tinkly piano and the silverware and the murmuring from the other diners, etc. There should be a lady with a wacky hat and a poodle as well.
Correct: “Last week Mariah and I totally got all the hairs ripped off our junk. Now I can completely rock my new mega low-rise Sevens!”
INcorrect: “Tara and myself were mortified to discover that we had perpetrated a nip-slip at the same event. The pavarottis didn’t know if they were coming or going, dog!”
Acceptable: “If you do not come up with the balance my boss is requesting, Vincent and myself will be forced to reupholster your scalp. Which is a shame, because Vince and myself are sympathetic to the rising costs of hair transplants.”
Okay. Air cleared. Carry on.
Now I’m frantically waiting for the coffee to kick in so I can go back in the archives of my brain and see if I’m guilty of that last one. LOVE your stellar examples!
My REAL job entails technical editing for engineers. And it’s part of the dealio to change “utilize” to “use” whenever possible (i.e., whenever we feel like it). If you can’t use “utilize” in your environmental-engineering techo-jargon, when CAN you use it? Is my question.
I am so in love with you for writing this post. No one at my company ever uses anything. They ALWAYS utilize.
And we have a PR person who often begins sentences “Importantly…” as in “Importantly, the new product will cause Boston Cream pies to spotaneously appear.”
AND for a while everything was getting carved out. Or sometimes carved-out. Meaning that we don’t do it anymore, someone else (most likely in India) does. But then we had programs we decided to keep doing. What were they? “Carved in,” or more recently, “Baked in.”
Good lawd Jeebus preserve me.
I once heard my chemistry teacher use the word “entitle” as a noun. Not surprisingly, I was the only one who burst out laughing.
Dude, you forgot “UNLAWFUL”!!! Gad, I crapping hate that one!
Currently topping my shit list is incorrect use of the word “disinterested.” Correct: “The competition will be judged by a disinterested party.” Incorrect: “I’m totally disinterested in that class.” Why not just hand me a rusty spoon with which to scrape out my own eyeballs?
Peeps also need to respect the spelling of “definitely.” Why do they not anymore?
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