Language can be a funny thing.

So I stole this from an e-mail that my dad sent today. It had me giggling pretty hard.

These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.
ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.

ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.


ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?


ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!


ATTORNEY: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
WITNESS: We both do.
ATTORNEY: Voodoo?
WITNESS: We do.
ATTORNEY: You do?
WITNESS: Yes, voodoo.


ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?


ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: Uh, he's twenty.


ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you sh*ttin' me?


ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Uh.... I was gettin' laid!


ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Are you sh*ttin' me? Your Honour, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?


ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Now whose death do you suppose terminated it?


ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Guess.


ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.


ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?WITNESS: All my autopsies are performed on dead people. Would you like to rephrase that?


ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.


ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy on him!


ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Huh....are you qualified to ask that question?


ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy? WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Oh, Jaylynn . . . what a classy name!

A friend and I were talking the other day about baby names. I tend to be a fan of traditional names, and am even completely fine with trendy, Must-See-TV-inspired names like Addison and Bailey. I DO, however, go completely nuts when people think the best way to make their kids *unique* is to bastardize the spelling of a name or (so much worse) make up a name completely.

If you do this to your child, I promise you, I will LAUGH at them if I ever meet them. "Deztynni, huh? That's absolutely lovely. Oh, you think she has a future in show business. Me too . . . I see a brass pole and a set of pasties as part of her (ahem) deztynni."

Anyway, here is one of my favorite baby-naming commentary sites. All examples are from message boards where women are genuinely proposing absolute verbal abominations be bestowed upon innocent newborns. Yeah, I get it. Kids make you fat. They put you through much pain and heartache. But seriously, try punishing them with guilt and shame later, like every other mother. Don't stick them with a stupid name. That's just mean.

The snarky comments are from some genius woman who feels the same way I do.

Enjoy.

Political jargon defined

Merriam-Webster offers these helpful definitions so we can more easily navigate some of the more annoying political jargon popping up in this year's elections.

Have fun!

A term I DO like

This one.

One more word

I also never want to hear the word FIERCE uttered in my presence ever again. You can thank him for that:
Way to ruin it for the rest of us, dude. Oh well, thankfully, with a new season of Top Chef underway, we'll all be talking about how on point and soulful our flavor profiles are. Life without Bravo is no life for me.

The dorkiness of hope.

I've always been one of those people who thought that "hopefully" was misused. You know, as in "Hopefully, I'll get a promotion," or "Hopefully, these ants will stop biting me soon." I've always thought this was an improper usage . . . that these statements were essentially saying that I'd be full of hope if I got a promotion or that the ants had enough hope to eventually stop biting.

But then Merriam-Webster straightened my butt out:

Main Entry: hope·ful·ly
Pronunciation: \ˈhōp-fə-lē\
Function: adverb
Date: 1593
1 : in a hopeful manner

2 : it is hoped : I hope : we hope

Usage: In the 1960s the second sense of hopefully, which dates to the early 18th century and had been in fairly widespread use since at least the 1930s, underwent a surge in popularity. A surge of criticism followed in reaction, but the criticism took no account of the grammar of adverbs. Hopefully in its second sense is a member of a class of adverbs known as disjuncts. Disjuncts serve as a means by which the author or speaker can comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached. Many other adverbs (as interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, unfortunately) are similarly used; most are so ordinary as to excite no comment or interest whatsoever. The second sense of hopefully is entirely standard.

After reading this, I realized two things:

1. I am not always right.

2. I am a dork. A huge, lame dork.

As promised . . . words I'm done hearing.

GREEN - As in going green. Yeah, we know. I'm all for finding an answer to climate change, but do we have to boil it down to such an obnoxiously oversimplified marketing term? Recycle. Don't drive so much. Buy a fuel efficient vehicle. Use those new-fangled light bulbs. But don't say you're going green.

ORGANIC - I'm a big fan of organic food, but I'm done hearing people talk about other stuff being metaphorically organic. Like marketing campaigns. Or relationships. Or design standards. Some words only work as metaphors for a few months. After that, they just sound pretentious.

ROBUST - Unless you're talking about coffee, I get cringe-y whenever this one comes up. Particularly because it usually precedes solutions. And, hey, that leads me to my next word . . .

SOLUTIONS - I know everyone is with me here. Do marketers think people hear that they have a bold new solution in trash disposal and think, "Thank god! I have so many trash disposal problems I need solved! Now, finally, there's a solution!"

BEST PRACTICES - A term (and usually a committee to define the term) that labels the most efficient way to do things. Seriously?

VALUE ADDED - It's just seems like such a freaking overstatement. We're not just giving you a free toaster, we're adding value to your account! Blech.

WEB 2.0 - It was never a clever play on jargon. Never. Not even for a second.

VIRAL - I can't even . . . I'm just going to cry.

Oh here we come, a'caucusing . . .

I've been thinking this whole time that "caucus" is a noun. And it IS, in fact, a noun. But when a to-remain-undisclosed candidate uses it, there's definite verbiness to it.

"When you go to caucus . . . " (or maybe this one's still a noun, but kind of a British usage, like going to Uni.)
"Caucus for me on Tuesday . . . "
"Go caucus yourself."

OK, I made that last one up. So I checked, as us wordy types do sometimes, and it IS both a noun and an intransitive verb. Here's the verb definition:

Caucus: to meet in or hold a caucus.

So I was wrong about the verb thing. But given this definition, I don't think it's right to say "Caucus for me." Go to caucus is OK, I guess, aside from being all weird and foppish sounding. I think I'm done hearing the word caucus. More about words I'm done hearing tomorrow.

Repetitive, isn't it, right, don't you think?

Why do people say 12 noon? Is it so we don't confuse it with 12 midnight? When someone says they'll meet me for lunch at 12, I kind of assume that they're talking about the 12 that's synonymous with noon. I'm not, like, a super genius, but I do have some deductive reasoning skills. Sheesh.

Is there a modern day equivalent to SCHOOL HOUSE ROCK?

Because there should be. I miss these kinds of things.

Freckles on her butt?

I've heard this little song about a thousand times since I was a kid, and never once did I realize it was a grammar exercise:

She has freckles on her butt.
She is nice.

The idea is that it teaches kids how silly things sound when the punctuation is wrong. It SHOULD read like this:

She has freckles on her,
but she is nice.

At first, I felt stupid and kind of left out that I hadn't understood it sooner. But then it occurred to me: this only works if you accept "She has freckles on her" as a complete thought. Why would anyone think it's OK to say it like that? She has freckles on her skin, arms, body, etc. But she has freckles on HER? Isn't that just redneck talk?

You got yer culottes on ya, Brandine?

Sure do, pa. Uh oh, the baby's got some Skol spit on her.
C'mere Cyndrell, lemme wipe that off.

Damn, woman. You ready to go? I'm anxious to get down to the Waffle House, cuz I hear the new waitress has a mole on her.

Yessum, I'm ready. But are you sure you wanna wear that t-shirt? It shows the world that third nipple on you.

And so on and so forth. She has freckles on her? That just doesn't sound right.

More mixed metaphors

So my dad pointed out a commercial to me this week. Basically, it's a couple being interrogated by a big monkey about how they're not planning adequately for retirement. At the end of the interrogation, the monkey says something like, "But what do I know? I'm just the 800-pound gorilla in the room." It's like he's trying to say "Hey, it's really obvious you're screwing up, but I'm the big obvious thing no one wants to talk about or deal with."

PROBLEM: Isn't the big obvious thing no one wants to talk about or deal with the ELEPHANT in the room? Isn't the 800-lb gorilla the thing that can just eat whatever it wants . . .cuz it's an 800-lb gorilla?

Dumb commercial. I'm going to stop all retirement savings in protest.

The happiest day of the year . . .

for word nerds everywhere is TODAY.

Verbal Detour

At a recent luncheon I attended, the speaker used the word “historicity,” which immediately triggered my “I’m tired of people trying to look smart by making up words” reflex. I threw the person sitting next to me a quizzical look, and together, we shook our heads in disgust.

Guess what . . . historicity is a word. It’s a noun meaning the quality or state of being historic. Now that I understand the meaning, I have to question his usage. Nonetheless, I owe Mr. Speaker an apology for my hasty eye rolling.

I found out later that several people at another table had the same reaction to the word. Imagine all the time we spent discussing the verbiage our speaker used rather than digesting the message he was trying to convey.