Language
There are a few things about our language that I'd like to address. One of them (and this has been pissing me off) is the usage of the adjective "mad" as an adverb, such as "mad smart", "mad dumb", "mad gay", "mad funny" and "mad weird". When did this happen? Did I miss some kind of conference where words suddenly switched parts of speech? This is stupid. The word "mad" has a few meanings.
Mad, adj.
1. angry: You make me mad.
2. rabid: That dog is mad.
3. insane: She's gone mad and is now in an insane asylum.
4. foolish: He was mad to hire this idiot.
Nowhere in these definitions does it say that "mad" means "very". But, this isn't the only problem with our language today. We've seemed to encounter the inability to form a sentence without using profanity. I'm not against profanity; after all, I use it. but when it gets used as every third word in you sentence, you sound like that's all you know is a bunch of swears and it takes away from the intelligence of anything you had to say. That is to say that what you were going to say was intelligent in the first place. A perfect example of this offense is the word "fuck". This word has been beaten to death by people that use its adverbial and adjectival form (which are both the same word) excessively. The problem with using a word too much is that it loses all its power. After a while, nobody pays attention to this once prominent little obscenity. It's become a part of our everyday language and has the same offensive significance as something like "darn".
"Like" has become another word you'd like to hear less of. These days, whenever you can't find the word for something, you just say "like". And it gets old very or, should I say, "mad" fast. Even if you know what the next word is going to be, some people just use it as a filler because they need to keep talking even if the have nothing to say.
The final complaint I have for now is the incorporation of ridiculous slangs into our everyday speech. By "ridiculous" I mean words/phrases like or "for real?" And some of the people that say this say it all the time. At least for this one, there is a definite source that we can blame. That source is rap. Rap has changed us all into ghetto dressed, inarticulate and naïve young people. Now, people think it's cool to be a complete idiot. People that have no idea what's going on outside their perfect little suburban lives and think that living in a place like Newark or Camden isn't an inconvenience in any way. These people don't know just how good they have it here in Morris County, NJ. This one of the richest counties in the country and since this is one of the richest countries in the world if not the richest, that makes Morris County one of the richest counties in existence. However, we still can't speak proper English and we were raised speaking it. I've met a foreign exchange student whose first language is German and she can speak better English than some of the Americans I've met. But rap isn't the only thing to blame for this. There are dozens of other factors that have changed us all into what we are. That, I'll save for next time, I've already digressed enough.
There are a few things about our language that I'd like to address. One of them (and this has been pissing me off) is the usage of the adjective "mad" as an adverb, such as "mad smart", "mad dumb", "mad gay", "mad funny" and "mad weird". When did this happen? Did I miss some kind of conference where words suddenly switched parts of speech? This is stupid. The word "mad" has a few meanings.
Mad, adj.
1. angry: You make me mad.
2. rabid: That dog is mad.
3. insane: She's gone mad and is now in an insane asylum.
4. foolish: He was mad to hire this idiot.
Nowhere in these definitions does it say that "mad" means "very". But, this isn't the only problem with our language today. We've seemed to encounter the inability to form a sentence without using profanity. I'm not against profanity; after all, I use it. but when it gets used as every third word in you sentence, you sound like that's all you know is a bunch of swears and it takes away from the intelligence of anything you had to say. That is to say that what you were going to say was intelligent in the first place. A perfect example of this offense is the word "fuck". This word has been beaten to death by people that use its adverbial and adjectival form (which are both the same word) excessively. The problem with using a word too much is that it loses all its power. After a while, nobody pays attention to this once prominent little obscenity. It's become a part of our everyday language and has the same offensive significance as something like "darn".
"Like" has become another word you'd like to hear less of. These days, whenever you can't find the word for something, you just say "like". And it gets old very or, should I say, "mad" fast. Even if you know what the next word is going to be, some people just use it as a filler because they need to keep talking even if the have nothing to say.
The final complaint I have for now is the incorporation of ridiculous slangs into our everyday speech. By "ridiculous" I mean words/phrases like or "for real?" And some of the people that say this say it all the time. At least for this one, there is a definite source that we can blame. That source is rap. Rap has changed us all into ghetto dressed, inarticulate and naïve young people. Now, people think it's cool to be a complete idiot. People that have no idea what's going on outside their perfect little suburban lives and think that living in a place like Newark or Camden isn't an inconvenience in any way. These people don't know just how good they have it here in Morris County, NJ. This one of the richest counties in the country and since this is one of the richest countries in the world if not the richest, that makes Morris County one of the richest counties in existence. However, we still can't speak proper English and we were raised speaking it. I've met a foreign exchange student whose first language is German and she can speak better English than some of the Americans I've met. But rap isn't the only thing to blame for this. There are dozens of other factors that have changed us all into what we are. That, I'll save for next time, I've already digressed enough.