Stepping foot and other turns of phrase I despise

Suddenly it's everywhere. Careless people were writing it before, in blogs and emails, but now it's made its way into actual articles and other places where sloppiness can no longer plead an excuse and the only remaining explanation is plain ignorance. Do people really think that 'stepping foot' is an acceptable way of describing perambulation?

Let's get this clear. If you stepped foot somewhere, that can only possibly mean that you stepped on a foot. It is to be hoped that you weren't dancing at the time. Perhaps you were trying to be clever and abstruse in referring to your own respective feet ('I stepped my right foot, then my left foot, then my right foot again...it was the last time I ever stepped foot in Walmart, I can tell you that!'), but it's still a cumbersome and awkward way of going about it.

If you want to talk about your feet, then think about what it is your feet are doing. If your feet are doing the stepping, then for heaven's sake let them be the subject of the sentence: 'My feet will never step in Walmart again!' Stepping is not something you do to your feet; it is something your feet do. If you want to talk about what you do with your feet, then use a verb that works: 'I will never set foot in Walmart again.' Passive vs. active, people. (Oh, my stars. Do I sound crochety?)

Then there's the growing trend toward substituting then for than, which I think comes not just from sloppy misspelling but from an actual misapprehension of which word means what. (That sort of thing can happen more and more as people read less and learn their lingo from hearsay rather than from the original written form. After all, if one has never seen the word 'could've' spelled out, and one doesn't understand the significance of the contraction, it is perfectly reasonable that one would assume the phrase is 'could of.' I've seen this.)

But back to this particular mondegreen. It crops up everywhere now: 'It is better to be happy then miserable,' for instance. Well, Solomon did say that even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness, but personally, I'd rather be miserable first, and then happy. Heh heh.

Fashion Tirade

Of course there's no such thing as objective fashion, because what we inherently find attractive is inevitably going to be coloured by the pervading fads and trends that have shaped our cultural awareness. But it is slightly frustrating to me to be so completely unable to find a decisive answer on what specific looks actually look the nicest, without regard to what sleight-of-hand they're trying to accomplish.

The driving force behind most fashion 'looks' seems to be mainly concerned with creating the illusion of tallness and thinness. Vertical lines (not stripes! Because that would be too obvious!) are supposed to lengthen and slim the figure. Skirts that stop just above the knee are supposed to make the legs look longer, as opposed to the drab, mid-calf length, which makes the legs look dumpy. Boot-cut jeans balance the legs, making the thighs look narrower in context. Skinny jeans give a slimming line and make the legs look longer.

I have yet to read a useful piece of advice on which look actually looks the nicest for its own sake. Since I am pretty happy with my shape, I really don't feel compelled to resort to optical illusions in my wardrobe; I'd much rather not waste time agonising over whether a particular style causes me to look - even if ever so slightly - like something I am not.

This annoyance of mine carries over to the perpetual articles in magazines and what-have-you, where we're regaled with Tips For Disguising Figure Flaws and Ten Easy Ways To Look Up To Five Pounds Slimmer. My thought is, rather than waste all that time and energy and effort studying these principles, buying new clothes, tanning, etc., why not just go ahead and lose the five pounds? I mean, if it's a legitimate figure flaw that needs to be fixed, then fix it. Otherwise, stop worrying about it.

A minor diatribe

Internet shorthand will always be with us (at least as long as we have the internet), but that won't stop me from gnashing my teeth at all the little expressions I find particularly irksome. And the one which at this moment has aroused my derision is the phrase dh, shorthand for, I can only suppose, Dear Husband.

A small part of me (a very, very small part) wants to like the convention, because it sounds so charming and refined to refer to someone as Dear. It also sounds almost British (as in, 'Dear Charlotte,' or 'Dear Mamma'), and anything British is sure to score high points with my passing fancy.

Another part of me wants to stop being annoyed by it, because some people whose writings I otherwise like tend to employ it, and I don't want to catch them in the crossfire of my snide and possibly quite irrational dislike.

Another part of me wants to encourage any instance of niceness and civility in our language that I find, because of course it is laudable to consider one's husband dear, isn't it?

But mainly I just find it annoying. It's a very tiresome cheapening of the language, like a case of chronic italics in an impressionable teenager or the overuse of the word 'love' to mean all things from mildly be interested in to passionately adore.

And why the need to perpetually tack on the chirpy adjective? It almost suggests some kind of insecurity, that one needs so flamboyantly to wear one's heart on one's sleeve and insist how dear one's husband is. It seems to imply a kind of superiority, in stark contrast to those of us poor saps who are so blase as not to publicly call our husbands dear at every opportunity. If you're content to let your husband off with the mere title of husband, which is nothing if not prosaically descriptive, without any reference to the state of your relationship with him, well then! We can see just how loving a wife you are!

In fact, why stop at dh? Why not go gung-ho for this Positive Speech thing and make up all kinds of cute little acronyms to demonstrate vociferously just how wonderful and healthy and enthusiastic we really are? How about my brat (beautiful righteous adorable tot) or my lunk (loving unselfish nice kid) or my gross (gorgeous reliable opinionated svelte spouse)? Yes, why don't we start scattering these little tidbits throughout our conversation and see if the wonderful trend will catch on?

Or is the point to be deliberately unintelligible? Is that why the lazy but somewhat onomatopoetic LOL was abandoned for the more obscure, erudite, and hence now wildly popular ROTFLOL? Because if it makes too much sense, then it wouldn't be clever and original enough to use it, now would it?