Please stop combining words, America

Snowmaggedon was never that clever, but the way it rolls off people's tongue in the mid-Atlantic would make you think they'd just discovered gift of gab. But Snowmageddon wasn't the only invention from the recent snow storms. Snowpocalypse was another word-meld that gained in popularity.

For a time I thought this melding of "snow" and a meteorological event was over. Then, on the splash page of MSNBC, there it was today: "Northeast braces for 'Snowicane'"

While the English-language's strength lies in its ability to evolve and adapt to new vernacular, can we come up with something that doesn't make us sound like teenage school girls? And it's not just weather-systems that we're naming. Wordsmith creations like "Frenemy" or "Brangelina" or "Facehook" (one who uses Facebook as a platform for hooking up). Muttering these words to a few close friends is acceptable, just like swearing is. But seeing these words up on news tickers like the Washington Post gets me worried.

Are we learning to say more with less? Possibly. Lord knows, we can speak much more succinctly than our founding fathers could write, and they could certainly write more efficiently than the Brits, and anyone can say more with less than the Russian (see "Crime and Punishment" for clarification).

But George Orwell had his own thoughts on the subject. In 1984, he satires what he sees as the destruction of the English Language through newspeak. The dumbing of the English language--the death of creative metaphors, logical arguments, etc.--is a scary prospect. While the vocabulary of newspeak isn't accurate, its underlying practice is. Think of how often people use 'suck', 'dude' and 'fuck' to intone different meanings. Surely there has to be a zestier way to pepper dialogue. Yet at the same time, none of those words illicit any constructive meaning. When something sucks, it doesn't explain what sucks about it. Oddly, suck is rarely ever meant to mean what it means, just like fuck is rarely used to describe intercourse. The meaning isn't in the definition of the word, but how it is said, which is the same way grunts and moans communicate their underlying meaning.

Consider, please, the next time you are about to write about your fucking life and how much it sucks that you could really cut to the meat of the matter. For the discerning journalists, consider 'snowicane' and its brethern as taboo: you're paid to write and describe and provide logic to a complex world. There's also the fact that the storm hitting the northeast is completely unrelated to a hurricane, and that the storm that hit the mid-atlantic, while hyperbole, did not induce Armageddon.