Junk Drawer of My Mind

It's time I sorted out the odd collection of things that are stuck in a corner of my brain. Feel free to check out if you have your own 'drawer' to clean. But I'm betting you have some of the same things in yours!

Unusual pronunciations:

Newscasters do this to annoy people like me - they change the syl-'la-bic accent from 'normal' usage. Ex. 'de-tails become de-'tails, har-'rass-ment becomes 'har-rass-ment. Why must they make up these new accents?

The word 'nuclear' gets mispronounced as 'nucular'. If they could read their own subtitles, this wouldn't happen! (Presidents sometimes do this too.)

Worn out phrases and words:

I read the last "that being said" I ever want to hear -  a couple years ago. Likewise the phrase, "Let me unpack this for you", makes me want to take a long vacation. I'll unpack myself, thank you.

Publishers dozing off?:

Twice, TWICE this year I've been in the middle of a good book, only to discover that a couple dozen pages are out of place, or missing. Who lets these books out of the gate?

Well-known authors get away with glaring editing problems. Tolstoy's lengthy War and Peace contains lots of, well, dryer lint caliber verbiage smack in the middle. That was a long time ago, you say? Well, Rowlings gets away with this too in The Goblet of Fire.

Useless odds and ends:

Does it bother anyone else that the library is always out of CS Lewis books? Oh, well. Just me then.

Vulgar bumper stickers, and appendages hanging from cars? Aren't there laws against this?

Labels on food often ONLY list certain culturally important ingredients, such as fat, sugar and calories.

It is not cute, in the interest of marketing, to re-spell right as 'rite' or are as 'r'. 

Well, that leaves only a few dust bunnies of verbal junk in the corners.Room for more to collect.