The Online Etymology Dictionary claims that “the weakened colloquial sense of ‘impressive, very good’ was recorded by 1961″. So perhaps “awesome” was never so big in my lifetime. Still, that doesn’t excuse people from using it twenty times in a paragraph.

What a meaningless, sophomoric, puerile, dogshit horseshit whaleshit idea for selling cars. This is clearly the work of a whole committee of adfucks because no single semi-educated human person with half a moral compass could be so careless and idiotic to open the cage to release this merciless crap into the universe.

I assume they’re using the term “Dynamics” to describe the cars’ powertrains. So really what they’re saying is “Efficient Powertrains”. Well why didn’t you horsefucking cockfuckers say that??? Did you really think the word DYNAMIC was so DYNAMIC that we wouldn’t notice???

“I’m a stupid asshole American who can’t read and thinks Africa is a country, and I don’t know what ‘dynamic’ means but Germans are smart so they must know more than me and WOW! The car is so dynamic!!! And efficient, too!!! Now I’m gonna go drink Red Bull with vodka and beat my kids! U-S-A! U-S-A!!!”

FUCK YOU

Fuck you, BMW. And fuck you, Germany, for allowing one of your greatest exported brands to be besmirched by some Madison-Avenue cockwads. No wait, they don’t even deserve to be called cockwads. They are COCKHOLES.

You know what would have been a better ad campaign, BMW? “Car good.” At least if you’re going to pander to our ignorance you can do it openly.

BMW…Car good….Me drive fast…Me get 29 mpg highway, 23 city.

And don’t even get me started on the byline: “A milestone for the future.” THAT’S NOT EVEN A THING!!!

That guy is a real asshole.

This is not grammatically correct:

My asshole is real itchy.

But in common parlance, many English speakers, even yours truly at times, use “real” as an adverb instead of the proper word, “really”. We say it’s “real cold” or “real cloudy”. We might describe someone as “real slutty” or “real violent”. On Fridays, we might get “real drunk”.

Language evolves, so there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with doing this. Personally, I find “really” has a better rhythm to it. But the main reason I hate “real” as an adverb is simply because I can’t ignore the mistake. When I hear someone say it’s “real cold”, even if I restrain myself from correcting them, or butchering them with a hatchet, which is what I normally would do, I still go through the mental motion of the correction in my head, “it’s REALLY cold, you fucking retard” (chop chop choppity chop).

Worse still is when I say it, and then have to correct myself.

It’s sad that it would actually be easier for me to get a lobotomy than to expect the world to speak proper.

I mean, properly. (DAMMIT!)

So why do we still give it this word that sounds like it was lifted from a piece of federal legislation outlawing it? And why the hell do we still have dictionaries with these kinds of definitions, e.g. Random House:

obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, esp. those having little or no artistic merit

Totally out of touch. Here’s another, from American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy:

Books, photographs, magazines, art, or music designed to excite sexual impulses and considered by public authorities or public opinion as in violation of accepted standards of sexual morality.

A violation of accepted standards of sexual morality? Really? I picture of tit? No, fuck YOU, American Heritage Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, or should I say, American Heritage Dictionary of Cultural Idiocy? Oh yes I totally went there.

Even the shortened versions, “porn”, and the ABOMINABLY bad, “porno” still sound ridiculous and archaic.

My suggestion? Let’s take back the word “smut”. Before people started saying “pornography” in the 19th century, they referred to “smut”. But nobody says “smut” anymore, so it’s ready to be repurposed. And they love repurposed words over at WordsILove. It’s not a true repurposing, but a shift in connotation, the way “queer” went from a slur to a positive affirmation of alternative gender and sexual identities. “Smut” also has the benefit of starting with our favorite consonant blend (heretofore to be called a “diblend”)….S+M.

I like masturbating to smut.

It’s likely I first got acquainted with it while studying for the SATs in high school, but I’m sure I hated it even before I heard it. But it took me until just today to realize why I hate it.

Normally I like words that sound like their meaning (here, “expressive of gloom, sullen”) but MOROSE sounds TOO MUCH like its meaning. It’s impossible to say it with a happy morose. Just to pronounce it, you have to adopt a slow, drawling elephant voice. “I feel…mo-ROOooows…” It takes work to say it, and when I’m feeling low, I get lazy.

So just say you’re sad from now on.

But the word “cosplay” was thought up by a monkey. A STUPID monkey. One with a brain injury and an incurable lisp. Also, the monkey is tied to the back of a door and people are throwing lawn darts at it. POISON TIP lawn darts.

Seriously, though. Just call it dress-up, okay?  I know you think “dress-up” only applies to children dressing up as mommy and daddy, or as doctor and mommy, or as daddy and daddy (if they live in Massachusetts), but really is it any different when an adult does it? You’re still wearing an outfit so you may pretend to be someone or something else. Just because you may sometimes do this so that someone can pretend they’re also having sex with that frog, or that character from Final Fantasy, doesn’t change the basic premise.

It’s dress-up. You’re dressing up. But that’s okay. Nobody thinks you’re a loser any more than we already did.

Here’s the thing, for real now. GooseBUMPS are cute. When you touch someone, say, kiss them on the neck or ears, and they get goosebumps, it’s very very sexy. But when they say, “you give me goosepimples!” all I can think about is pimples. Not sexy.

If you have a habit of saying “goosepimples” I suggest you unlearn it before you ruin an otherwise wonderful date.

When a person is going to Las Vegas, or even when simply talking about Las Vegas, rather than saying

I’m going to Las Vegas.

they say

I’m going to Vegas, baby!

Did Las Vegas change its name to Vegas Baby? It is the only reasonable explanation. The alternative is that everyone I know has been jamming acorns up their nose. But if this were true, the US economy would have crumbled leaving millions unemployed and thousands of families living in sprawling tent villages outside our cities.

Surely Las Vegas changed their name and didn’t tell me. Not like I care. I’m never going to Vegas Baby.

It gets its name from the first software used to produce these graphics, which was originally spelled “Chiron”. The company that makes the software changed its own name in 1975 to Chyron Corporation, to capitalize on the popularity of the software, and on the timeless cool of the letter “Y”. Today, “chyron” is a thing, not just a product or a company.

This often happens for companies that invent a popular new product or service; the company name becomes a word, such as xerox, fedex, google, wifebeater, and spoon (named after Edvard Tobias van Spuhn, its designer — the 1940’s original is still available through the Design Within Reach catalogue — for $700 or kr3,478).

Yesterday I posted a word I love: “chyme“. If I apply the same reasoning, “chyron” should be a word I love, but it isn’t, because “chyron” is a stupid word for the thing it describes. “Chyron” sounds like a Buck Rogers brand, or at least Star Trek brand, of evil robot, not a video-graphics package. But now it’s too late, this thing is established and we’ll be hearing about chyrons for years. Given time, it will be verbed just like xerox and google and bukkake.