Well, actually

Have you ever noticed how often people use the word "actually"? It drive me nuts. It seems that about 90% of the population can't get through two sentences without qualifying something with "actually". I often wonder if omitting this adverb indicates that the speaker is being virtual.

This isn't the only word that people seem to get stuck on and use repetitively in their speech patterns, it's just the one that for the past few months has started to grind on my auditory nerves and bruise my cochleas.

I actually went to lunch with Bruno today. I guess if actually is not there the listener is to assume the speaker means his imaginary friend Kunta Kente`.

I attended a training class today and the person leading the class must have used actually about 200 times in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. The guy is incredibly intelligent; the class was software development training. Intellect seems to have little to do with this infliction. In years past I probably would have said something sarcastic to him during or after the class, but I have mellowed with age and I don't really enjoy offending nice people like I once did. Now I write on this blog or on my website and hope those spoken of and about just don't notice (Since I estimate 90% of the population to be suffering from this though, maybe you are one of the spoken of individuals). At the height of the speaker's madness he used actually three times in two sentences.

The overuse of this word ranks up there with other things like saying "have went" instead of "have gone". I can't prove it but I think I may be the last living, English speaking person that knows the difference.

I also often wonder why so many people say "I could care less" when they obviously mean to say "I could not care less". If you could care less then you care about the subject at hand to some degree. The degree to which you care is not clear, only that you care at least some. But if you say I could not care less, it is clear that you care nothing at all about the subject matter.

Since I'm on this rant, why do people constantly refer to anything that can be qualified numerically with "ton". Ton is a weight, yet every day i hear things like: "I have a ton of work to do." Good for you, you will really have some muscles when you are through. Since I am a geek I constantly hear things like: "That program has tons of code in it" or "I've visited tons of technical sites and I cannot find the answer." Can't people say something like: "I visited numerous sites without finding anything that helped."?

This one really annoys me - calling people "anal". That word has become a euphemism for a__h____. Freud was probably the first person to use that term. He basically meant stingy. But today, quite often, when someone is annoying they are referred to as anal. People using this word frequently seem like pseudo-intellectual fruitcakes to me, throwing around words they think make them sound cool, but in fact make them sound silly to anyone who knows the meaning of the words.

Maybe you are wondering what my problem is because you think these things don't matter. They do matter though. Every time a word changes meaning slightly or to a larger degree, the entire language is changed. These nuances make it harder for present day people to understand the language of the past and even harder for people years from now to try to understand things written today in context of things written in the past. Colloquialisms change with each generation, perhaps even several times within a generation in some case. This causes confusion in the language and causes misinterpretation in historical writings. If someone living in 2098 reads an informal document written by an average speaker in 2008 and sees the word "actually" or "actual" used she may not realize that it was merely a way of joining thoughts used by people with poor grammar skills. That word may cause the document to be interpreted incorrectly when a sentence not containing the word "actual" or "actually" is not implied leading the reader to believe the meaning is "not real".

There are certainly many other words that are being misused in our society. We never say "the" correctly - almost always "thu". In the south we say "ya'll" and "gonna". Someone digging up a letter written by two people from the southern U.S. 200 years from now without having good documentation from the current era would certainly have trouble with that one. How would anyone ever get "going to" from "gonna". We say "fixing to leave" in place of "preparing to leave" or "about to leave".

I often wonder how much we don't know about history because we freely and happily modify the language to sound cool (another word that undergoes meaning change frequently). Think of the confusion a reader in 100 years might have comparing a document from the 1700s to one written in 2008 if both use the word "gay" to refer to someone.