On words and phrases

     Words and phrases I’m thoroughly sick of include: Oh . . . My . . . God, like, committed, very, truly, world-class, politically correct and, most especially, awesome.

     All of these should be immediately struck out of the language by Congress.  America would be a better place.

     But if we’re going to insist on grossly overusing awesome, we should at least add a few useful derivatives of it.  Such as: awesomnify (verb: to endow oneself or someone else with awesomeness by employing makeup and/or designer-label attire, or, in exceptional cases, by the strategic display of minimal attire, as in: “That string bikini really awesomenifies her.”), and awesomenitude (to designate a certain degree of awesomeness, as in: “The candidate has only managed to acquire twenty-one percent awesomenitude in the polls.”), and awesomed, to describe someone who has just been exposed to the dazzling presence of a movie star, TV talking head, or famous author and has consequently fainted from an overload of awestruck.

     While we’re on the subject of oughta-be words, how about adding gruntled, because you can’t possibly be disgruntled until you’ve been happily gruntled, can you?  Likewise, we should add wrought in the emotional sense to the language, because you can’t become overwrought until you’re pretty darned wrought to start with. 

     We should also insert ology-ology into our dictionaries, to designate “the study of the myriad disciplines that end in –ology.” 

     We need whole fistfuls more words to catch up with the times, such as:  Amazonery, cellularity, cyberaddict, blogcrawler, tweetitis, textitude, E-bayed, Facebookery, and Googleite.         

     We’re supposed to use the term African-American for black folks these days in order to be politically correct. But when you think about it, the only people really entitled to use such a hyphenated designator are the Native-Americans whose reddish-skinned ancestors owned the whole damned place for thousands of years before British-Americans and French-Americans and Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, and German-Americans and Chinese-Americans and Russian-Americans and South-American-Americans and all those other brazen interlopers in all shades came here in droves from everywhere else on the planet to take over the most attractive countryside and start paving it.

     Maybe it’s time to begin calling ALL of us simply Americans and just delete those hyphenated designators and all the divisive baggage that comes with them.

Phil