Friday, May 30, 2008

People who CVS are bad-grammaring

There have always been those types who, unable to put themselves to the trouble of finding the right word to use and fitting it into the right context, simply grab onto the handiest approximation of what they intend to convey and slap a good-sounding ending onto it.

Pretending to turn a noun into a verb by appending a suffix to it - for instance, pretending to turn a noun into a verb by suffixing it - is a common and long-standing trick. I know this, of course. Language has been evolving for eons, and eventually the modified word passes into accepted usage. I mean, nobody bothers to police the non-verb-ity (nounity? nouniness?) of microwave or contact any more.

But nowhere has this trend been so starkly egregious as in the recent wave of CVS enthusiasts. 'Had fun CVSing!' or 'Good trip CVSing!' is their motto, without bothering to analyse what precisely it is they did at CVS. Was it, indeed, shopping? Well, then, why not say so, to wit, 'I've been shopping at CVS!'? I know, I know, it takes up so many more syllables that way! 'I've been CVSing!' they declare, with all the pithiness of the good bargain-hunters they are. It stands to reason that those people who are careful with their money would be likewise conservative of extra syllables.

What if we started applying this funny little grammar freehand to jolly well any area of life? The results could save us thousands of wasted breaths a year:

'I'm fooding!' vs. the cumbersome 'I'm eating food.'
'He's bathrooming' vs. 'He's using the bathroom' or even 'He's in the bathroom.' (Because, of course, in our world, no one would ever broach this topic in the first person.)
'I was carring' vs. 'I was riding in/driving/washing the car.' (See how deliciously sloppy and unspecific the first instance is? No need to waste time pinpointing the exact nature of the activity.)
'I'm typing text' vs. 'I'm texting'? Oooh, slippery slope.

1 comment:

the Joneses said...

Y'all might just be ahead of the trend, anticipating the day when towns consist of nothing but banks, Wal-Marts, and CVS stores.

-- SJ