the lot

A lot should really be alot. It would save alot of time for alot of people and would allow alot more people to allot less time while saying a little more in their text messages without having to allot more funds to their budget

I get that their is alot of debate regarding this on the internet and it seems that alot of word facists and – shoch horror – racists really get a kick out of holding this over people, alot of people.

To the word fascists is say merely, ‘get over it’, we move with the time here on the intergoogle and if  ‘meh’ can make it into the dictionary then the words ‘a’ and ‘lot’ can hook up. The other alott has two t’s anyway, so what’s the hassle.

To the racists out there, and I use the word lightly because race is not really a valid way of making distinctions between people, I say ‘if you have to win an argument by mugging ‘English as a second, third, fourth or eighth language’ people with grammar’ (yes, they generally are far smarter than you, the single language, first-world males who seem to simultaneously inhabit every comment field on every website of the entire www) then you should, perhaps, not have engaged in the argument in the first place.

Please don’t confuse this to pulling someone up on semantics: one of the most pleasurable passtimes know to the human animal.

Dodgey Seamsters

In the realm of pithy American sayings, not much rears its head above the marginally obnoxious, ‘cut to the chase’ being a stand out example. It’s probably not even that it’s American, but rather that the idiom harks to Hollywood and the life barely any of us lead, and being humans, who don’t often like things that don’t have anything to do with us, it rubs us the wrong way, as if being rubbed the right way in public was any way to conduct you affairs

But it’s on the subject of rubbing that I have to say the Americans have hit on what might be one of the most sublime idioms there is. And by sublime here you need to  picture the fat little kid with his face full of chocolate cake on a rainy winters’ day, not some crazy six-armed Indian goddess or tard infested dance-music hellhole

I really think this is one of those bottom-line issues that might just be the one thing we all have in common; the one thing to bridge our all our differences, something we could, perhaps, look to basing the UN charter on, because you know that when you do get that new piece of clothing, no matter how well-fitting it seems at some stage you are eventually going to find the tweak: that one spot where a thread or label or inner seam just doesn’t sit right. And there’s the rub.

It’s the aha moment, because you always knew there was going to be one and walking around not knowing where it is or when it was going to strike was a torture, again, of the sublime kind. This sublime being a lot less like the little fat kid and a lot more like the crazy six armed lady’s younger brother – the one with the sword.

I also have this problem with food and take it as a bad omen if I don’t get a stain on something new the first time I eat in it.

Fit, Fits, Fat

It really is that simple.

Fitted – pffft.

sneak, sneaks, snuck

(they do allow this, but they are trying sneaked where ever they can)

Onomatopoeia ?

There is a word out there. I was tempted to say lurking, but it’s not, it’s out there and it’s just that I can’t see it.

It’s out there like fractals are out there and it just took that hairy little Swiss Yoda guy and a dot-matrix printer to start seeing the edges.

I’ve seen the edges, because I know what the word means, I just don’t know what it is.

It’s the one that describes word that don’t sound like what they mean.

Take Sanguine, for example.

This little fucker means ‘cheerfully optimistic’, but it doesn’t sound cheerfully optimistic. It sounds dreary and mean and sad and hopeless and lost and unfound.

Even the most optimistic champion of the language couldn’t argue a case for anything stronger than a contemplative, mellow, warmish sort of half-glow leaning towards a tepid glass of stale chai tea.

Now I’m not one to argue with etymology and the route from the Latin for blood to the flushed and rosy cheeks of the eternally joyous is painfully clear, but it doesn’t change the fact that the word is just wrong.

Obviously, not being the boss of common usage, I’m in no position to do anything other than point out the absurdity of hanging on to language that’s clearly on the wrong side of the zeitgeist.

Anyway, I seem to have wandered slightly off topic.

There’s a word for words that sound like how they sound: onomatopoeia and I want to know what to call words that don’t sound like what they mean.

???