Inaugural Deputy of the Week!

Someone signing himself "The last bastion," but with an email address suspiciously similar to that of my parents, submitted the following rant:

Basically, I'm actually really, really fed up.

I know the use of words like the above are not errors in the grammatical sense but their constant overuse makes me shout at the radio or tv so I miss the point of the discussion. Repeating words like lovely (that is a lovely, lovely dress) is the habit of gushing celebrity commentators and as such can be forgiven. What gets my goat is when hard-news readers and the like fall into the same lazy patterns or refer to children as "kids".

Do you yourself personally agree?

Yours in agreement,
The last bastion

How can I disagree with my dad? Okay, I've spent the last 30-ahem years doing so, but here he has a point. I'm sure CNN had higher grammatical standards back when it was a real news channel, but now there are typos on the ticker and high-school-level linguistic lapses.

At least now I know where I inherited the "shouting at the TV" gene.

Plus he's right about "I, personally ..."--that drives me nuts. As does "very unique," which crops up much more than it should.

Copyeditor General's ruling: People should think before they speak. Especially if they have news-anchor hair.

And yay to my dad for being the inaugural Deputy of the Week! Send me your personal goat-getters and I'll give you ranting space, too!

I should come up with some kind of shiny badge, shouldn't I?