NO NO NO x 103 NO!

You may have it free! The word for implies in exchange for something, and that something should be a noun. Free is not a noun, it’s an adjective.

NO AGAIN Impact is a noun! There can be an impact on the bottom line.

NO NO NO! The PERPETRATORS escaped. When they catch someone whom they think may be a perpetrator, that person will be a suspect.

NO AGAIN! The police are NOT looking for suspects, they are looking for perpetrators. This one irritated me to the point of giving it a page of its own.

It is, however, one of my major pet peeves! The word is “regardless”. The word irregardless is not correct in formal style. It is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Irregardless has been considered a blunder for decades. and is also a waste of two perfectly good letters.

Our government is primarily responsible for this one, but the media had a hand in it.

The pace of change, especially in technology and entertainment is such that new words are constantly entering the language, first as slang, and eventually as “Webster Approved.”

Of course, language evolves along with culture. I can write: “I ‘tweeted’ something I ‘Googled’ to the people I ‘friended’ in ‘cyberspace,’ including my BFF,” and most people know what I am describing.

Why, however, invent a new word, “incentivise,” for example, meaning “to motivate?”

The existing and still politically correct ‘motivate,’ or even the wordy phrase “‘provide incentives for,” work quite well.

This leads to further corruption with the invention of conjugations, synonyms and antonyms to the new but redundant words — “Disincentivise” and “Reincentivise” are only two examples.

These hurtle further down the word clutter road to absurdities like; incentivisation, disincentivisation and a very disturbing pseudo-disincentivisation, meaning: pretending to demotivate when your true purpose is to motivate.

We once called that “reverse psychology,” and nobody misunderstood what we meant.

Big words impress only shallow people unless they are both understood by the audience and essential to the topic.

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