At risk of sounding like the old woman on the porch (“Get off my lawn, you god damn kids!!”), it irritates me to no end to hear people shorten “vacation” to “vay-cay”.
I don’t know what it is about that particular abbreviation, as things like “wi-fi” doesn’t bother me at all, and I’m learning to live with “hi-def”. And I understand that communication outlets like texting and twitter, while not outright demanding the slide in the English language, certainly encourage it, and I’m starting to be okay with that, too.
So I’m not sure what it is about hearing someone say “vay-cay” that makes me want to slap them. More than once.
I hate vaycay as well. Also “resto” for restaurant and “veggie” for vegetable. I used to use veggie myself sometimes, in a playful way. I participate on several cooking/food BBs, though, and it’s clear that some people are incapable of saying/typing vegetable and always use veggie. Drives me nuts.
Vay-cay is definitely fruity but there are some older ones that I don’t approve of as well. Shortening ‘second’ to ‘sec’ as in ‘Just a sec’ pissed me off royally even as a small child because the word isn’t that complicated to begin with and it takes about as long to say as the amount of time it represents if you pronounce it slowly adding some much needed reason to the universe. Excessive use of verbal shorthand generally means that the person guilty of it is intellectually challenged and of poor moral character at least in my world.
The one that ticks me off is good-bye. Anyone who is too lazy to say God Be With Ye is intellectually challenged and or poor moral character. And don’t even get me started on Halloween…
I am glad to see another soldier in the fight. Halloween will always be All-Hallows-Evening (never Eve) in my house but sometimes we have to pick our battles due to ground already lost. We just have to fortify and prepare for the next heathen insurgence.
I’ll get back to you this aft on whether I like “vay-cay”. I’ve never heard it before. I’ve read the term “vaca” but thought it was pronounced “vakkah”.
People have complained about the decline of English for a very long time. The oldest screed I know of was written to complain about the damage Ben Johnson and William Shakespeare caused.
When people tell me the uniform resource locator, I demand that they state it properly: hyper text transfer protocol colon forward slash forward slash world wide wide period ‘s’ as in sam ‘t’ as in tom ‘r’ as in reach around…