Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Midgets and the Transgendered,

Today I am going to talk about the English Language.

Or more precisely, how certain modern uses of the English language just don't make any sense.

E-mail/Mail

E-mail stands for Electronic Mail, the electronic form of the word Mail.

Mail is the collective term for what the postwoman (or man, or post-transgendered-person, or postmidget) delivers to your door. If we were going to check to see what they had delivered, we might say "I'm going to check my mail." If you were going to write something to send to someone, you might say, "I'm going to write a letter."

So why, please tell me, do people now say: "I'm going to check my e-mails" or "I've just received an e-mail" or "I'm writing an e-mail" ????

Surely they should be saying things like, "I'm going to check my e-mail" (no "s"), "I've just received an e-letter" or "I'm writing an e-letter" ????

Also:
What if someone sends you a file attachement? Isn't that an e-parcel?

The Media

Many people these days seem to take "The Media" to mean "The News". It doesn't mean The News at all. The News USES The Media to get the news to The People.

Media is the plural of Medium. TV is a Medium. Radio is a Medium. Newspapers are a Medium. Magazines are a Medium. Books are a Medium. The World Wide Web is a Medium? Or is it the Internet? What's the difference between those two? Well, The Internet is the physical network of computers, whereas the World Wide Web refers to the websites containing all the information. The World Wide Web and E-mail are two functions of The Internet. So I suppose it is The Internet which is the Medium (like a TV is), whereas the World Wide Web and E-mail are like the TV shows that appear on TV, they are what it is used for.

But I'm getting side-tracked here...

The Media can also include the following:

• Oil Paint
• Clay
• Charcoal
• Pencils
• Pens
• Plastercine
• Watercolour Paint
• Crayons
• etc...

Why?

Well, because an art teacher might say to an art student: "What medium are you going to use for your next piece of art?" And Media is merely the plural of Medium.

The reason why many people take The Media to mean The News, is because The News is the most frequent use of The Media, because there are always new things to tell people. New lies and half baked truths to get people to accept. Newspapers, The Internet, The TV, The Radio, these are all good ways to sell your version of the days events to the general public. Hence, the common useage of The Media comes to mean News Via TV, Newspapers, Radio or The Internet.

I mean, if there was some breaking news, BBC News aren't going to manufacture sculptures that represent the new information. It's just not cost- or time-effective.

But it's still Media.

And that also means Multimedia could mean creating a piece of art using a variety of media, for example pencils, paint, sculpture, and maybe a TV balanced on the top of the sculture repeatedly flashing the words "News Flash: Everything You Think You Are Exists Only As Thoughts Or Memories."

Shan't & Won't

We all know that Don't is the abreviation of Do Not.

But what is Shan't the abreviation of? Shall Not? Well shouldn't it be written as Sha'n't?

What about Won't? Is that an abreviation of Will Not? Well then shouldn't that be Wi'n't?

Regular/Frequent

People often say Regular when they really mean Frequent.

Think about it.

Frequent means How Often something happens.
Regular merely refers to whether or not it happens at evenly-spaced time intervals.

For example, Christmas happens regularly. Only once a year, but it's the exact same date every year. That's EXTREMELY regular. Whereas if I had a cold I might cough FREQUENTLY, but I'm not coughing REGULARLY. I'm not coughing precisely once every minute, at exactly the same time each time.

Txt Spk

If u thnk wrtg lk ths is cul u cn fk off and di. I dnt evn wana no u.