Perpetual wrongness

TV, advertising, and even the NEWS help to perpetuate wrongness. Why is that, I wonder.... aside from the fact that this is America which plays fast and loose with information and education all the time.

Words are misused, mispronounced, and generally mistreated by the public media, which is a shame, because most folks get their information almost totally from the public media. There is no respect or love for language anymore. It is a "whatever" sort of world now. Sigh.

Let me share with you a couple of the things the media is driving me nuts with right now. (I heard you say "short drive"! )

My friends, you have heard me say this before, but the word is DISSECT. Look it up, that's the way it is spelled. The two esses are there to tell you that the word has a short "i" sound. It is pronounced "dis-sect", which means to take apart. The word is NOT dye-sect. If there were such a word, it would be spelled "disect" and would mean, like bisect, to cut in halves. If you doubt me, I direct you attention to the words "dessert" and "desert". Every time I hear a supposedly educated person say "dye-sect", it irritates me so much I'd like to give them their just desserts and desert them in a desert.

Okay, yes, I used to teach biology, so it may seem a bit parochial for me to be complaining about a "scientific" word, but it has entered the common vernacular and wrong is wrong! Where is Edwin Newman when we need him? (I guess, at 88, he has given up on correcting people. Too bad, he was good at it).

There is an ad showing a woman signing up for a variable rate loan, and as soon as she does, she has a monkey on her back. Only it isn't a monkey, it is a young chimpanzee. How can it be that in the 21st century there are still people who don't know that chimps are apes and not monkeys? [What am I saying??!! There are still people who think Darwin said we were descended from monkeys... wonder if those people can distinguish us from gorillas?]

And don't get me started on the use of statistics. "Two out of every ten women will face cancer", they say... which is bad accounting on two points. They don't report the age range- most women will be 70 or older when they develop cancer- and they don't report the logical reverse to that stat, which is that eight out of every ten women will NOT face cancer. Granted, a 20% chance of getting cancer is nothing to sniff at, but it's also nothing to panic about. I despise agencies that play with statistics to frighten people, usually to frighten them away from their money.

I could go on, and probably will, but those are the examples that are pushing my buttons right now.

Although I also think it is terribly wrong that the guys who play the cavemen in the Geico commercials will NOT be playing them in the new TV series. What kind of a screwed up world is this, anyway?

He may be a caveman, but he can say "dissect" properly. Can you?