Items here will be observations about things I run across that irritate me with the way language is used these days. Most of these odd uses are trivial in nature; but, if you get enough trivial things, pretty soon you have something non-trivial.
CLOUD
So here’s one that I consider to be misleading. My computer keeps wanting me to save things to the “cloud”. Of course they don’t really mean “cloud” what they mean is “a virtual storage service that lets you save files online so you don’t need to bring your portable hard drive with you everywhere you go.” So why call it a “cloud” instead of “online storage”? Here’s what I find for an explanation: Cloud “is named so because your data could be stored anywhere and can be accessed anywhere from the world via the Internet.” Hate to say it but it is still online storage and not a cloud where this stuff is being stored. Cloud creates misleading images for me and tends to blur reality. As I said, these are trivial things but still iritating to this oddball Professor Emeritus.
Chicom
I assume many of you have run across this in recent days. It has popped up any number of times with the WuHan Virus coverage. I suppose it has been around awhile before that but I’d not seen it before. In the good old days when you used acronyms of this sort you wrote out the word and then put the acronym in () behind the word. You were then able to use the acronym thereafter. Not so, these days. Things like Chicom pop up all over the place and, if you are lucky, you will be able to figure it out from the context (or in absolute frustration run a Google search on it). It is so much easier on the reader if you put the full word (phrase) in the text the first time you use it. In this case, I finally figured out that Chicom refers to the Chinese Communists. Baldheaded!
