My Sick Mind

I was taking an online FEMA Emergency Management Course today and I stumbled across this passage: When American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, 900 responders from 50 different agencies were able to communicate with one another. Response agencies had learned an invaluable lesson from the Air Florida tragedy. Invaluable is a strange word. Webster's New College dictionary defines it as: "extremely valuable; having value too great to measure; priceless." It can be extremely valuable or priceless. Something can be extremely valuable and still have a price. If it is priceless, by definition it is "of inestimable value; beyond price." It seems like we should say valuable or priceless , and leave invaluable to people who don't really know how valuable something is. Would that sentence have been any different if it said "response agencies had learned a valuable lesson?" No. Why bother using invaluable? If they meant priceless, then s...

One of my little hobbies is paying attention to subtle changes in our language. My favorite is the way the word party became a verb . “I’m going to party” has a completely different connotation than “I’m going to a party”. The former has a drug and alcohol subtext, while the latter sounds more like ice cream and cake, but either can be used by children of all ages. Of course, we have been using "like" when we mean "said" for ages, and it seems to be engrained now; as are anyways , same difference and an old favorite, " a whole nother ". I guess those little colloquialisms are supposed to be charming or cute, but what they usually do is make adults sound like children, which is almost never a good idea, unless there are drugs and alcohol involved. Maybe parents pick it up from their kids, I don’t know, since I am not around children all that much. It is probably why I only speak like that when drugs and alcohol are involved. The most recent one is the way...