Thanks again to Dana for the superb contributions. I created the first two words and Dana defined them. The last one is wholly Dana’s invention.

ne•o•vo•ca•bu•li•sm n. [ˌnioʊvoˈkæbjulɪzm]

[f. ancient Gr. neo- new + Latin vocābulum a word or term + -ism suffix forming a noun of action.]

The process of creating, defining, and publishing new words in a compendium designed solely for such ends.

The Neophrastic Superfluary is the quaint result of careful neovocabulism.

se•man•ti•var•i•a•tion n. [səˌmæntəværiˈeʃən]

[f. ancient Gr. neo- new + Latin vocābulum a word or term + -ism suffix forming a noun of action.]

1. The intentional misuse of words and phrases for comic effect.

2. A deliberate solecism, Freudian slip, or spoonerism uttered for comic effect.

As much as I would like to say that President Bush’s all-too-frequent grammatical mistakes are legitimate semantivariations, I am afraid that they remain embarrassing grammatical mistakes.

pe•di•a•trex•ple•tive n. [pidiəˈtrɛksplɪtɪv]

[portmanteau of pediatric and expletive > ancient Gr. paedo-, pedo- boy, child + -ia suffix forming nouns + Latin explētīv-us serving to fill out, f. explēre, f. ex- out + plēre to fill.]

The gutteral-glottal utterance prooduced by pre-verbal toddlers and emerging-vocabulary preschoolers used to express displeasure, outrage, or frustration. More commonly known as “the two-year-old F-you.”

The tiny girl’s opposition to being denied a second serving of cake was shockingly displayed in a frenzied paroxysm of spastic thrashing and pediatrexpletives.

Thanks to Dana for this one.

dys•vox•i•a n. [dɪsˈvɑksiə]

[f. dys- bad, unlucky (f. Gr. dus-) + L. vox voice, sound + -ia suffix forming abstract nouns from adjectives]

a vocal syndrome that affects the tone of voice so as to obscure the intended meaning of a statement with unintentional sarcasm, irony, or facetiousness

I am beginning to doubt Tom — he told me his boss unjustly fired him for his dysvoxia, but when he told me he was suing he seemed to say it with an inappropriate tone of playfulness that led me to believe he was joking.

Oh dear, my dysvoxia has caused you to misinterpret me; I sincerely think your baby truly has very nice ears.

Strangely enough, persons suffering from dysvoxia often have trouble conveying actual sarcasm.

I am fascinated by language, which is why I love grammar so much. I wanted to write a blog post about apostrophes–and where they’re headed–but it turned into a full-blown article with footnotes and everything. It would be too difficult to reformat it if I pasted it into the WordPress box, so I just uploaded the PDF instead.

It’s eight pages and esoteric, so if you don’t want to read it I won’t be the least bit offended.

But here it is if you’re interested.

I’ve been developing a thought process recently that has led me to accomplish daunting tasks with ease and to eschew the worry associated with pending crises of variable alarm. Those with a propensity for idle worry will find themselves in despair over looming, unwanted events, whereas I can simply pass these events off as complete before they have been born. To attack such a paradox, I examine the event from the future: by X time, it will have been done. While I may not have started a term paper due a week later, I can avoid stress (which of course releases cortisone into the brain, inhibiting intelligent thought) by treating the paper as complete, by picturing myself one week later with several neat pages stapled together. I call such perspective the Future Perfect Ideal, which derives its name from the grammatical aspect of the thought process it defines.

In the name of fair judgment, I looked at my philosophy from the standpoint of the opposition. Time is an invented concept, and therefore there is no time but the present. ‘Past’ and ‘Future’ do not and cannot exist, as they are merely concepts laid out on a time line invented by humans, who chose arbitrarily to make it linear. (After all, who says time is not a cycle? Hundreds of cultures treat it that way, and some even have a mobile week focusing on ‘today.’) Because the future does not exist, ulterior events cannot logically be ‘complete.’ The only certainty about the future is that it can’t be predicted: so there is no way to know whether my term paper will actually be finished in the next seven days.

A fair argument. But assuming that I am still alive in seven days, and that I am duly compelled to complete college assignments on or before their deadlines, it is virtually certain that I will have completed my paper next week. The Future Perfect Ideal is by nature a conditional argument. But, ceteris parabus, it makes for sound logic.

What makes the Future Perfect Ideal adoptable is the notion that worry accomplishes nothing, and therefore it is useless to lament something that has yet to be undertaken. More preferable are the early congratulations borne by its acceptance. A recent example of the success of my philosophy was its application to three actual term papers assigned and due at generally the same times. Rather than fret over my personal, upcoming apocalypse, I simply told myself that at a certain point in time — namely, the end of the semester — I will have had three excellent term papers iced with shiny staples. Such was the case: while I worked methodically and kept the present in my peripheral vision, I focused on the future, on the date of completion for each paper. Two papers received A’s and one an A+.

I taught myself long ago not to worry — though we’re all human, and can’t help but indulge once in a while — but the addition of the Future Perfect Ideal to my mental repertoire of weapons against deadlines has proven to be a great asset.

spurniture n furniture left for dead at the curb

Dad was fed up with the pink Barbie dresser he had trashpicked in the name of frugality, so he dumped it as second-hand spurniture and set out to replace it with something manly.

Here’s my problem: I’m a dish sponge trying to be a car-wash sponge. There is so much I want to read, so much I want to write, so much I want to learn, and so little time to do it. I want to be able to absorb life faster, or to absorb more knowledge each time I soak myself in words, but there are temporal as well as physical limitations to the extent of one’s education. This is where my Literary ADD comes into play: I want to read every book, and read them all right now. I order books from Amazon about twenty times faster than I can read them. I often lament that as a human being I must give those mesonoxian hours to Morpheus which otherwise could be spent reading and writing. It is a mutual transaction, however, for Morpheus gives back to me those eccentric stories of myself and those wild visions which we call dreams.

I find that writing down my dreams helps me to remember them far more often when I wake up. Before I made a habit of scribbling down the ‘plots’ in a notebook, I would seldom recall my dreams, except when their utter singularity had stamped a burning impression on my mind, or when some object, word, or semblance in real life triggered a subconscious memory relapse hours, or sometimes days, later. I begin to wonder if dreams have meaning, or if they are merely the result of the brain ‘doodling in the margins.’ I don’t subscribe to the popular notion that dreams are capable of portending future events: time travel is impossible because time is an invented concept, not a ‘location.’ A time line is simply there to help us relate the past to the present and the present to the future — it is not a map, and none of the points, save for an infinitesimally small one at the present, exist.

But the question of underlying meaning in dreams is perhaps one we will never answer. There are hundreds of theories out there, and even dream interpretation books and websites that scrutinize each salient element of the dream and relate it somehow to a real-life concept, fear, emotion, or object. I can’t say one way or another whether these are correct. What I can say, however, is that whatever images the mind conjures during sleep certainly retain the same connotations to the dreamer as they do in waking life. The brain develops relativity of concepts, images, words, etc. through a massive network of neuron connections, which is a physical structure that is not altered during sleep. Therefore it is safe to say that, in the strictest sense, the objects one sees in a dream represent the same thing they do in the subconscious as in the conscious mind. Someone who is intimidated by authority figures will connect policemen, soldiers, etc. with a certain level of fear; in dreams these figures still carry the intimidations they impose by day.

Does one dreaming about authority conjure images of these familiar instantiations, or does the dream originate with an authority figure and automatically arouse emotions of fear? Moreover, what exactly causes one to dream about one topic or another? Do the thoughts and emotions from a day’s work transfer to the world of the subconscious? Do subconscious thoughts by day give rise to sub-subconscious thoughts by night? And does the mind really hold the power to warn itself against itself — in other words, can it analyze its own faults and present them in a parable? I’m not reluctant to latch onto this belief, which dream analysts try to understand — the human mind is an astonishingly powerful, and equally mysterious, entity. But why would such a powerful machine as a human mind dissect its scruples in the dark?

It’s common knowledge that the government is synonymous with inefficiency. Tack on whatever epithets you will–slow, circuitous, hypocritical–they’re mostly true. So should it come as a surprise that the way the government is handling the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 is less than intelligent? For those unfamiliar–that is, if you haven’t received one of those letters–the government plans to send most people who make less than $75,000 a payment this May of $300 to $600 to stimulate the economy. Sounds good so far. But it cost $60 million to print the letters, many millions of which inappropriately arrived in the hands of those not receiving a payment. I know this because I got the letter, and I’m not getting a cent because I can be claimed as a dependent. Meticulous IRS records somewhere in Washington show that I am not eligible, so why spend money to send me a letter? I suppose this would be way too easy, but why not just send the eligible taxpayers a check with a small printed explanation?

Gee, I wonder why everyone’s worried about a recession.

I really thought I’d have the time this semester to update my blog, but it turns out I’m overwhelmed with other things and unfortunately have to kill it off until summer.

So goodbye till then.

Considering several rationales, including, but not limited to, the lack of funding for grammar school, the need to appeal to consumers who have horrible grammar themselves, or a typographical blunder, I’m putting my money on down-to-earth kitschiness as the reason why H&R Block’s current slogan reads “You Got People.”

Stop me if I’m making things up, but got don’t swing that way. It’s a past-tense form of the verb to get, meaning to acquire, and it’s right at home in sentences like “I got an anatomically correct sculpture for my birthday” and “Crayola chicken pox got me out of detention.”

For the couch-potato linguist who milks his excitement vicariously through grammatical structures, to get is friends with the auxiliary verb to have. There are an infinite number of sentence constructions using the two: “Dylan has gotten more muscular this month,” “Dylan’s gotten nineteen gold medals,” etc.

So, the burning question: If it’s has gotten and have gotten, how come I can say has got and have got, as in “Dylan has got to stop using steroids?”?

Glad you asked. The answer is that you can say whatever you want. No one is are going to stopping you.

Seriously, though, the has got construction may at one point have been passed off as “incorrect usage,” as are most budding grammatical constructions and turns of phrase. In most cases, though, it’s just a matter of English changing to adapt to (and to adopt) a new way of saying something. Remember the nineteenth century? Probably not. I’ll fill you in: people said “Have you this?” and “Have you that?” Got wasn’t yet at center stage — back then it was only a groupie. But now, we’re inclined towards turns of phrase like “Got a cigarette?” and “Got Milk?,” in which got wholly replaces have, even though got is traditionally the past-tense form of to get, and not an infinitive. Am I confusing you yet?

It seems that phrases like “Got Milk?” are shorter forms of phrases like “Have You Got Milk?,” but because in the former the auxiliary verb is nowhere to be found, and also because of the overly prim and proper, almost wholesomely Amish connotation of “Have You Got Milk?” on a billboard, I’ll leave this one alone.

So, back to the starting line: Why does a gigantic corporation like H&R Block, which obviously has the budget for a plethora of top-notch marketing executives, screw up the grammar in their slogan? “You’ve Got People” sounds good enough to me — though as you may have noticed from this article, I’m a grammar Nazi, and it very well may be that “You Got People” sounds “good enough” to the average layperson. I’ll admit that “You Have People” sounds like less of a corporate slogan and more of a cross stitch pattern you’d find in your mother’s kitchen. But come on, H&R — I know you went to accounting school, but surely you know about auxiliary verbs?

While I’m at it, I’ll share the new Domino’s advertising campaign slogan with you: “You Got 30 Minutes.” (Which, by the way, is a scam of a campaign that focuses not on 30-minute delivery, but the “gift” of free time to their consumers.)

You be the judge. If you speak English, you have a minuscule influence on the way our language develops. It’s the speakers, not some committee of cantankerous grammar grouches, that shape the language.

But maybe it’s sticklers like me who complain about the language that keep it from evolving too quickly.