Misuse of Language

Out of all the things that I thought about over the week-end that I wanted to blog about this week, I can't think of any of them now. I will say this, it irks me when people misuse words (not that I don't ever misuse a word, myself, you understand, it just irks me when other people do it). Sometimes it may not even be actual misuse, it may be that I'm used to hearing things a certain way, and it bothers me to hear it said differently. For example, I know it used to be standard on news broadcasts about trials, they made a point of saying that the defendant 'pled' either guilty or not guilty. Lately they always say 'pleaded;' to be honest, I don't know for sure that one is more correct than the other (UPDATE: the spell-checker tells me that 'pled' is not a word--it doesn't even make an intelligent suggestion as to what word I might mean, so maybe 'pleaded' is correct). I'm used to hearing it one way, and now it bugs me to hear it differently.

I've noticed also that people don't seem to know the difference between 'hung' and 'hanged' anymore. To be hanged means to have a rope tied around your neck and have the support knocked out from under you so that you die. A picture can be hung on the wall; that's not quite the same thing.

'Electrocuted' is another word that I've heard misused a lot lately. I have a friend at church who is an electrician by trade, and one night a bunch of us at the church were having a fish-fry. One of the associate pastors got a call that this electrician (who would normally have been with us for the fish fry, but he hadn't made it home from work yet) had taken an electrical shock. He called us together and announced that this man had been electrocuted, and asked us to pray for him. I almost asked if we shouldn't be praying for his family. After the prayer, he told us which hospital was treating the electrician; then I realized that he hadn't been electrocuted... (Don't scare me like that!)