Linguistic Rant 1

Anyone has known me for even five minutes knows that I am partial to ranting (and holding unnecessarily insigifnicant grudges for unnecessarily long periods of time--a story for another day), so it should be no surprise that I post the occassional rant on Combat Shock.

Today's rant regards people who infuse certain words or phrases into their habitual speech pattern that either a) don't make any sense, b) are superfulous or c) just plain old irritate the hell out of me. For example, I despise it when people try to emphasize the magnitude of the story they are telling by prefacing a statement with "When I tell you that...," then go on to describe an action that they, of course, think is earth shattering, and finally don't finish their thought by referring back to the "When I tell you that..." i.e. someone might say, "When I tell you that at my old job, I had so much more responsibility than I do at this one." That's it! That's the entire sentence. Shouldn't it be more like, "When I tell you that at my old job, I had so much more responsibility than I do at this one, I mean it!" At least that would make sense.

Another example is when people preface a statment with, "Can I just tell you..." and then proceed to tell me without waiting for an answer. What if I simply didn't want them to tell me? If you want to tell me something, just tell me. Don't ask me and then tell me if you aren't planning on waiting for an answer.

I don't know what happened to engender this sort of speech pattern to be so prevalent in society today. And it's not just among youths--adults have begun speaking this way as well. Adults who lived through the fifties.

People, let's all try to use the language that we've all agreed upon.