I’m a redhead and I hate the term ginger. It doesn’t make any sense: fresh or powdered, ginger root is not red. Though it could make sense if it was synonymous with dirty blonde hair.
“Bae”. You mean your ghetto ass has become so damn lazy that you can’t pronounce the second “B” in “baBe”?
Right on cue!
I agree, and this reminds me of another one: “poo” instead of “poop.” What happened to that second “p”?
People on this board misuse “wiki” all the time. They use it to refer to Wikipedia as an entity, or a single Wikipedia article. “Here’s what wiki has to say” or “here’s the wiki on the topic.”
But Wikipedia is a wiki. There are many other wikis out there. There are wikis for pop culture entities like TV shows and comic books. There’s one for law. People set up wikis for their internal company communication. They get created for software. THERE ARE A LOT OF WIKIS OUT THERE.
So when people offhandedly refer to Wikipedia or a single Wikipedia article as “wiki” or “a wiki” it drives me nuts. But I don’t correct them because it appears that that’s just the way things are going to be. Sigh.
You are assuming without evidence that the shortening is based on ignorance, and that if only everyone was as knowledgeable as you this wouldn’t happen. But I don’t need you to “correct” me with a lecture about what a wiki is, thanks. I know what it is. Wikipedia is a long word, so what’s the harm in shortening it for convenience? If I’m talking about some other wiki, I’ll say so. Wikipedia quite reasonably gets to be the default because it’s so successful and widely used.
I didn’t. I posted in a thread about words I hate but have resigned myself that they are here to stay. And at the end of the thread I specifically say how I don’t correct people because it’s here to stay.
If you are taking every post on this board or even in this thread personally, it must be painful to be you.
I rather think that it’s the people who are “driven nuts” by such trivial everyday usages and feel a barely suppressed urge to CORRECT PEOPLE IN CAPITALS (assembling half a dozen links for something that anyone who has been on the internet for more than half an hour already knows) that are having the painful time.
Here’s another one: “chair” instead of “chairman.” As in: “Congratulations to Dr. Smith on being named the new chair of our department!” It even gets used as a verb: “Frank Jones will chair the committee.”
The reason it bugs me is that the entire reason we have the word “chairman” is to describe the person who sits in the chair, whether metaphorically or literally. (I was surprised when I learned that in many, if not most, academic institutions, a person who is named to an “endowed chair,” as in “The John W. Smith Professor of Chemistry” or whatever, actually gets a real, physical, ceremonial chair with a plaque on it to keep in his office.) The chair is the position of being head of a department or committee; the chairman is the person who occupies the position. Calling a person a chair is a bit like saying that this November, we’re going to elect a “presidency.”
I realize it’s done in this age of feminism and (attempted) equality between the sexes for lack of a gender-neutral term, but I would prefer that if a woman is occupying the chair, we simply call her the chairwoman. But that still leaves no gender-neutral term for when we’re talking about a hypothetical or unknown person, as in “Dr. Smith is retiring at the end of this year, so we’re searching for a new chair,” or “who is the chair of your department?” So we wind up calling a person a chair.
“wrong” when used as an adverb. Also, I find it deeply disturbing when people use “fewer” and “less” incorrectly.
When I was a young lad, we all wanted to buy fancy wheels for our cars. Wheels, NOT rims! Rims are just the part of the wheel that the bead of the tire seals against!
Except that that is how living languages work. New words are coined; old worlds fall out of favor; some words shift meaning. If you dislike that, try speaking Latin.
Because of a stupid cartoon, the term has also led to internet “ginger hate.”:mad:
So, Dr. Smith is the new Chair…- but from “Dr. Smith” you dont know his/her gender. What to do, what to do…
Ginger, however, has been used as a color name for, I think, quite a while. Often for orange-ish cats. Perhaps the use for redheads started to take off because of the popularity of that Blind Faith drummer guy.
It would indeed appear to make more sense if redheads were called “turmerics”.
So where does the association of ginger with a darker orange-red color derive from? Was there a common food product made with ginger that was traditionally colored reddish? So far as I’m aware, gingerbread is no redder than any other baked goods. But ginger snaps are often reddish. It’s interesting that ginger cats usually have a paler stripe that maps closely to ginger root, and a darker stripe that’s similar to human redhead color.
^Ginger Grant.
Whoops, gotta go.
Ginger Rogers was born Virginia McMath, so I can kind of see how “Ginger” might derive from “Virginia”. Much more tolerable than “Ginny”.
You’re right; the announcement should have used Dr. Smith’s full name… Dr. Pat Smith.
One word I no longer use is “actress”. A person who acts is an “actor”, regardless of gender. “Waitress”, well, that becomes a little less practical to shed, unless one goes with “server” or “tipee”.
But “chairman” could easily be a genderless title: “man” derives from “manual”, meaning to handle or operate, so “chairman” should be seen to be “person who mans the chair”, not “man of the chair”.
Cite on that etymology for man. It doesn’t gibe with the OED or any other source that I have ever encountered.
Chairman is far from genderless. Like fireman, policeman, and so forth, it comes from the era when positions of authority were male by default.