Wordy

I love watching and listening to language evolve, month by month. Though jargon tends to annoy the hell out of me, slang is fascinating and I've always got my ears open for something I've not heard before. I tend to have firmly polarised views about individual items, either loving or hating them.

For example, I'm a frequent user of the very hippyish "like" as verbal punctuation in a sentence ("It was, like, one of the best gigs I've been to"), but I can't bear last year's trend (in the UK, anyway) of starting every sentence with "so" without any preceding dependency ("So I went to this gig at The Social...").

I hold the view, with equal fervency and complete lack of rational justification, that "teh internet" is cool, whereas "teh interwebs" grates. I can't work out why, since both are derived from leet (which, especially as it mutates into kitty pidgin, is always fun). Maybe it's the implicit snobbery.

"It is what it is" seems to be doing the rounds a lot recently. The idea's OK - a stoic, Zen-like acceptance of the unchangeable essence of things - but the specific implementation is a bit too fatalistic, not to mention almost comically gnomic. Can we just say "You have to take it on its own terms" instead?

The latest trend I think I've spotted is the creation of adjectives by taking a verb and putting a "y" on the end. I first saw "spendy" being used instead of "expensive" and thought it was cute, but otherwise unremarkable. Then I saw it again, so I checked out Urban Dictionary.

As well as "expensive", apparently it has a potentially derisive connotation implying "trendy" too. That's an innovative use of suggestion and I decided I quite liked it. But then I saw "listeny" (for "audible") in someone's blog and "talky" (for "spoken") in one of the papers, which seemed more straightforward.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about those two - nor the wider trend that they imply - but my gut feeling is unfavourable. While I salute the elegant simplicity of the concept, I'm one of those people who enjoys the richness and variety of language. I want more words rather than less. (Fewer! I mean fewer!)

While this construction isn't entirely without precedent (needy, grumpy, chilly and so on), making perfectly good words like "expensive" redundant - or, indeed, perfectly good words like "redundant", er, retirey - seems rather a shame, not to mention unnecessary. Let's see whether the idea catches on, or becomes unfavoury.

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 05 June 2007 at 13:37.
Received 3 comments so far.

People who use the expression "teh interwebs" seem to be deeply annoying. Not that I should be prejudiced by something so trivial, but I am.

Listeny, retirey, favoury - is this at the forefront of a Stanley Unwin revival?

Comment by betty on Tuesday 05 June 2007 at 19:46.

Oooh, Stanley Unwin - there's a name I've not heard for a long while. Now I want to hear Ogden's Nut Gone Flake again.

Comment by Hg on Tuesday 05 June 2007 at 21:07.

Spendy / listeny and similar words sound like Joss-isms and probably are. Buffy and her friends spoke like that, because Joss Whedon speaks like that. It's not that new, Whedon fans have been using it since before the end of the BtVS series.

Comment by Caroline on Wednesday 13 June 2007 at 15:19.

http://www.hydragenic.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hydragen/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1839

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