I didn't think I would write part 2 to my Pet peeves so soon. I was sitting in front of my computer at home the other night, mentally jotting down the first elements of my peeves, and I thought to myself, five is good. I'm pretty sure those are my big ones. And as peeves go, they're pretty minimal. So I posted them for all and sundry.
As I was completing that post, there was a teeny tiny voice in the back of my mind that was telling me I had missed something. And I was missing something important. "You're gonna kick yourself when you remember it," this voice was saying. And today I remembered. And kicked myself. If you swing your leg back at the knee quickly enough, and you have a modicum of flexibility, you can kick your own ass with your heel. Try it.
Three Letter Acronyms. My peeve is not with these creations themselves. Truth be told, I delight, in moderation, at the fact that the phrase itself could be reduced to one. In much the same way that I delight in reading the word 'monosyllabic'.
No, my peeve is with people (and I'm a strong proponent of the axiom that 'people are stupid') who colloquially misuse them. By this I mean people who say things like: PIN number, SIN number, ATM machine, PDF format, and the like. I want to reach behind these people as they are saying these things to me, cock my elbow just so, angle my hand in the plane perpendicular to that of the floor, smile disarmingly, and then smack them upside the back of their head. I want to say, "Look, don't you realize that the 'N' actually stands for 'number' and you're just being redundant?"
I don't say this, though. And I restrain myself from the head smack, which would almost certainly be reciprocated. It is not so much this particular peeve that bothers me. I think it is more the fact that (the English) language in general is casually abused so much. It reminds me, now that I think about it, of how I just recently mentioned that television is a tool that has not lived up to its potential. It's not the tool; it's the uses to which people put it.
I'd hate to see a lightsaber in the hands of Jar Jar Binks. Similarly, I mourn the fact that a tool as eloquent as language is used as nothing more than a hammer more often than not.
And to clarify my point about 'people are stupid'; I also think that any given person is not. You as an individual possess, no doubt, more redeeming qualities than those for which I would subconsciously condemn you. It's when a person gets together with other persons that they then become people. I know. I can go from 'person' to 'people' very quickly.
And do you know what else is delightfully ironic? I'd love to get a 300 inch, flat-screen, high definition, plasma super cool TV. Now who's the tool?
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