The Decline and Fall of American English

The first of these is the not-a-real-word “referenced.”

Reference is a noun. As in: The Oxford English Dictionary is a reliable reference.

Reference may be employed as an adjective. As is: The O.E.D. is a reliable reference book.

Reference is not a verb.

The verb form of this noun is “refer to” or “referred to.”

Note bene: Adding the letters “ed” to a noun does not transmute that noun into a verb. It’s bad English. It’s not English at all.

“Man, we were beering heavily last night. I damn near off-chaired myself.”

I have spoken. Ipse dixit. Shut up.

Now as for “negatively affected.”

You morons, you cowards, you timorous reporters and worse editors at The New York Times, The Washington Post, the … (What! Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?)

Hemingway said, correctly, “the adjective is the mortal enemy of the noun.”

In the drooling, pathetic “negatively affected” patois of English and idiocy, we see cowardice on multiple levels.

Consider the idiotic sentence: “The garbage truck negatively affected the little girl and the pet dog that was defending her.” Wouldn’t it be more accurate to write, “The garbage truck killed the little girl”? Or, more optimistically, “killed the girl and hurt the dog”?

Please, New York Times copy desk: Negatively affected?

My short temper and advanced age may have negatively affected my ability to write this column, but just because it is still legal to write like that, does that mean I should do it?

Then we have “impacted on.”

Grr.

Impact is a noun. It is not a verb.

“The impact of Webster’s Dictionary, 11^th Edition, thrown by an irate city editor, split the reporter’s head open, and he bled out all over the newsroom floor” is a correct use of the noun “impact.”

“The reporter’s head was impacted by a large book thrown by his city editor” is not even English. Plus which, the reporter who wrote such a sentence, and the editors who allowed it, deserved it.

Now let us address the words “conservative,” and “liberal,” and “migrant.”

Stand back and let me limber up and take some deep breaths.

There is nothing “conservative” about right-wing politics in the United States today. It is Fascist, medieval, an aspiration to religious tyranny, as in Iran. That’s what “conservative” means in the United States today. It is neo-Fascist. Women, get used to it.

And “liberal”? It’s not a curse word, no matter how many times neo-Fascists employ it to try to tap dance on our heads. Responsible editors should not allow them to wield it like that.

The English philosophers and economists John Locke, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith propounded a liberal philosophy, as did the Frenchmen Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Upon this liberal philosophy the United States of America was founded.

Remember those frightening liberals, Ben Franklin, Tom Jefferson, George Washington, Sam Adams and Alex Hamilton? The cats who founded our nation?

Don’t remember any of them? Haven’t read them? Then siddown and shut up. You don’t know what “liberal” is, or “conservative” either. You’re just another piece of human pork with a ring in your nose being led you know not where.

Now let’s consider “migrant.” Migrants are people with, let’s call it a roving lifestyle: the Bedouins of the sands of Araby, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari, for example.

People forced from their homes by war, persecution and genocide are not migrants; they are refugees.

The million-and-counting Palestinians who have fled their homes are not “migrants.” They are refugees.

The hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who have fled the neo-Fascist regime of Daniel Ortega and his malignant wife are not “migrants.” They are refugees.

The millions of Muslims who have fled India under the despicable Narendra Modi are not “migrants.” They are refugees.

And the million and counting Russians who have fled Russia under the neo-Fascist Vladimir Putin. Are they migrants, or refugees?

So come on, New York Times, Washington Post, reporters and editors everywhere: Don’t use language to put a flesh-colored Band-Aid on people bleeding to death.

How many gallons of blood, how many deaths have been covered up, hidden, by these O-so-polite turns of phrase: conservative, liberal, negatively affected, migrants?

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Netanyahu is conservative. Palestinians are migrants.

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