It's like saying one thing...

I know I sort of promised to keep this web log free of the technical boring stuff regarding language. But this isn't boring. It's hilarious. (Imagine Buffy's way of saying that. You know when she says "It kiiilllled me" or "It's hilaaaaarious". She's so dang inflected.)

I just wish I had heard the story on NPR and noticed this and commented on it before this other "~michael" fellow did. (I take the tilde in his sign-off to mean that he's sort-of a "michael". I however like to think I'm "∞Michael")

Michael Adams made this excellent observation on the American Dialect Society List

I heard Nora Raum's little prescriptivist essay on NPR, the one in which she decried the development of other than etymological senses of words -- you can't say "half of the population was decimated" because the "deci-" is 10%; you should only use "massive" to describe mountain ranges, which have mass, but not headaches, which don't. She complained that people say "literally" when they're not being remotely literal; she complained about "ironically" used in any loose sense. Then she concluded by admitting that maybe she is too "anal," but I didn't know how to take that -- literally or ironically. A perfect example of McKean's Law in operation, I think.

~ Michael

Mckean's Law, conflated with Skitt's Law and Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation) states roughly that any article, post or statement correcting grammar, punctuation, spelling or usage is bound to contain at least one eror, the likelihood of which is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.

I mashed together the definitions I found here.

Yes I left that there on purpose. It's spelled that way in the article I linked to.