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If there were an Olympics for grammar, sports commentators would surely come last. Or should that just be “would surely last”? No-one can have failed to notice Beijing’s trend for noun-to-verb mass conversion here satirised by Harry Pearson of the Guardian:
“And word coming out of the US camp is that D’Ladedah Tubbs, who all-comered when semi-finalling in the 400 metres, has positived. Until Wada have B-sampled we can’t start scandaling but I’m hearing some of the media in America have already furore-ed and I’m sure we can expect some real controversying in the next 24 hours.”
But the worst example of all is the new verb “to medal”. “I’m confident that I’ll be able to medal…”, and even, heard just now on Radio 5, “Michael Phelps is now the most medalled athlete of all time”. The only thing that’s really getting a meddling is our beloved language…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Grammar, Irritating Things, Sport and that. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
I quite agree that that sort of language is impacting English negatively.
BTW: Who is “Randall Hopkirk” (anti-spam word)? I suppose I could just google it…
Damn straight, K, nobody wants to negatively impact English. (Whoops… looks like I just split-infinitived…)
“Randall and Hopkirk Deceased” is a remake of a late ’60s prog starring my comedy heroes Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. All the captcha words are connected to them in some way, as is the site title (”Very Poor” was an early Reeves catchphrase).
Yesterday, I found myself saying, “Well, why don’t you leave your car here and train down to London instead?” Don’t worry, I’m already planning hara-kiri.
I noticed there was some interesting medalling going on during the mens Olympic synchronised diving competition last week actually. For some reason there was a camera in the showers and the divers were shown extensively meddling in their Speedos after each dive. Interesting to note that each nation appeared to have a different meddling style…