Thursday, March 15, 2007

Grammar

With my one free eye (the blogging eye), I'm mostly watching the NCAA Tourney (hang in there, Old Dominion!), so I don't have a lot of time for posting. However, I've been meaning to complain for some time about the -gate suffix. Can we retire it? Seriously. "Purgegate" is about as far from meaningful as you can get.

While I'm whingeing (foul on ODU, they're tanking...), something else: "momentarily" means "for a moment." Not "in a moment." It's an adverb, much like "hopefully"--another lost cause. So, when, for instance, a media conglomerate puts up a message on their online basketball stream (for example) reading, "Please stand by, your game will resume momentarily," they have misused the word. Unless they mean that it will resume sporadically in momentary bursts for an undefined period of time. (Unlikely.) There's no reason to forswear "in a moment" for "momentarily," either. It's like using "impact" as a verb. It gains us nothing since we already have "affect."

I do not mention this hopefully--I recognize that corporate America has forever ruined the word's proper use. Ah well.

Oh, for the love of Mike, ODU has missed eight in a row . . .

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