B On Q - Good Morning everyone! Hopefully those recent torrential downpours here in the North East haven't mentally got to you yet. - Just buckle up folks! The English language has been taking so much of a beating during the last few decades that I truly wonder where we are moving to in terms of reasonably conversing with one another. Ever the more and weirder word coinages, acronyms and abbreviations may to some extent very well facilitate matters on a linguistic level amongst English native speakers, but it, sure as hell, does just the opposite for both foreigners, like myself, and tourists. Speaking tongue in cheek, just imagine you come here to visit this great country and lay eyes on something like BLT, but you are too bashful to ask and not in the mood to look it up on your iPhone either. You will most unlikely taste a potentially good sandwich layered with bacon, lettuce and tomatoes. Another example is BOGO. What the heck is BOGO? Just imagine all those fantastic bargains one may miss out on, and how much more dough would end up in retailers' cash registers once BOGO (Buy One Get One) was demystified! - ASAP, short for as soon as possible was pretty much the linguistic front runner which I stumbled across in my language learning career. Then lots of others followed such as SOB (son of a bitch), WTF (what the f...), MYOB (mind your own business - Hallelujah, grammatically speaking, finally a complete sentence!), LMAO (laughed my ass off), TLC (tender loving care), TY (thank you), and so on and so forth. Only God knows how many more of those acronyms orbit around without my knowledge. One thing is for sure though, hundreds if not thousands more are to come as this has turned out to be not just some kind of fancy trend or temporary fad but a persistent tool to seriously dismantle, disfigure and hatch up language the way we know it. Sure, lots of words consist of multiple syllables and are more or less tricky to spell and decipher even, but do we in all earnest, need to call it quits by just abbreviating, shortening and altering words like that? Kids and young folks are used to texting just like that and above all fast and furiously, but just pick someone randomly, even a nerd is perfectly good a choice, and ask them to write half a page about anything the way they were taught in school. I'll bet you, the majority will fail because as intricate and in- lingo as lots of those substitutes are, they will eventually rock the most solid language foundation if used exclusively on a daily base. "You snooze, you lose" or "If you don't use it, you'll lose it" are proverbial testimonies demonstrating how quickly we may in fact lose what we perhaps thought of as indestructibly written in stone. Alright, there are plenty of words that are difficult to spell and even pronounce and are therefore cut short and linguistically redundantly spat out in the form of clusters of letters like OB GYN, SAD, GED, DA, ATM, DMV, CEO to name only a few examples. It makes me wonder though, is District Attorney (DA) really that hard of a word to handle lexically correctly? Give me a break, people! - What cracks me up are word amputees like transi, legit, delic, etc. Even my spell checker is screaming out here! Are you guys honestly that lazy that you can't finish those three- and four- syllable words? - Then there's the still comparatively small group of word creations where two words are pulled together and blended into one new term like smog for smoke and fog (I know, quite old already but still), cabbit for cat and rabbit, fantabulous stemming from fantastic and fabulous, fugly for f... and ugly, etc. Words like these may certainly cause a great deal of confusion as well, especially for learners of English. I was used to correcting lots of exam papers, home assignments, and other written projects down to a T, but after taking a break from doing so for seven years now, I suddenly find myself struggling with correct spelling at times, too because I have also shifted most of my written focus from paper to the computer. OMG, I can hear my former colleagues say in disdain! Just kidding, as long as I know the difference between donut and doughnut, tonite and tonight, plow and plough, I should be fine. By the way, only tonite was underlined. What does this tell you?
Buy small and local Hi everybody! - Coming from a tiny country like Austria, one might assume that globalisation is just a phenomenon tailored for larger nations, but no, it has also been affecting us all across Europe. Globalisation itself is of complex nature, and even though I'm not planning to write about globalisation per se today, it somehow dictates our overall shopping behavior by bringing in more and more big box chain stores worldwide which sets the general trend for methodically and eventually putting local small family- run as well as individualists' shops out of business. In the 70ies I remember mom and dad taking us along to a wide range of stores from the baker to the butcher, the grocer's, the florist, the hard ware place, the electrician, the tobacco store, etc. What great memories our weekly trips to the market created for us. There we would hand- pick fresh fruit, produce, and other delicacies. Sometimes we would even get a piece of fruit or a carrot fo...
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