Tuesday, October 29, 2013

How It Happens

   The Public Service Announcement is shown repeatedly, advising viewers to get their shingles shot.  The speaker is recounting his experience with shingles, saying he was so miserable that he felt like he just wanted  "to crawl up into a ball."   Since  this ad is run over and over, the assumption will be that this is the way to go, no more will we curl up into a ball, we'll crawl up there somehow. 
    It reminds me of the massive undertaking in the book, "The Professor and the Madman."  The compilers of the OED solicited word input from anyone who could document three  in-print usages of a word, which they would then include in the Oxford English Dictionary, kind of the grand-daddy of them all.   So if today's TV ads control the future of the language, so be it. 
    I don't care (but it sounds stupid).

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