_Enthuse_

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Oct 8 23:20:46 UTC 2010


Heard on NBC News:

"[Proper Name] is _enthused_ with her pending graduation from
college!" or some such.


The war against _enthuse_ has been raging at least since I was a
grade-schooler in the '40's. At the time, being yet a child and,
hence, open to all kinds of language shift, I could never understand
in what way the use of this word could possibly be problematic and
deserving of prescriptivist opprobrium. Nowadays, as my intellectual
clarity has matured over the span of dekkids, I now understand
completely: _enthuse_ is wrong. It's as simple as that.

To coin a paraphrase:

"Every time we think we've buried it, it gets dug right back up!"

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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