Eclectic

Tag: language use (page 1 of 1)

Restored Habitat?

I go biking in a lovely spot on Puget Sound. Occasionally, I pause to read the signs along the way. One sign explains that the bay behind the sign was always grassland and used as grazing land until it was “restored” as habitat for salmon. Say what? It was not “restored” it was “developed” to serve as a habitat for salmon. I don’t have any problem with what was done with it, but I object to the inaccurate language usage. I’d like to believe it was just carelessness but I suspect it was done to make it seem that people had destroyed salmon habitat and the damage was being repaired! In fact just the opposite occurred, native grassland was destroyed to create a habitat for salmon. It did not ruin my day. I like the new habitat and greatly enjoy seeing salmon in the bay occasionally. Color me an “old school” English teacher, which I most certainly am.

Rants about Language usage

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!