I got my results back from my Health for Life bloodwork yesterday. The numbers weren’t all that surprising – my cholesterol numbers are good but my triglycerides and body fat index are high. When I was entering the numbers into the little evaluation system, I noticed that you could enter numbers associated with tests done while fasting, and tests done while non-fasting. I didn’t remember doing anything fast, and so…

It got me thinking (and we all know where that usually leads)…

I am becoming tired of words with more than one meaning, especially when there are other words that share a meaning but those words themselves only have one meaning (or at least a fewer number of meanings).

Confused already? Don’t worry – this is the 800th post on this blog so you know I’m not going to leave you hanging.

Let’s take the words “fast” and “quick” and do a comparison.

Right off the bat you will notice that fast can mean two different things: going without food, doing something rapidly or quickly. Which begs the question, why would I ever need to use the word fast for the latter definition when there are perfectly good words like rapid or quick?

Rapid could be a problem though, since that could describe quickly moving water –  so let’s reserve rapid as a noun for, well, rapids, and look at quick.

I am moving quickly. The water is moving quickly (and we call those rapids). There’s really no other use for quickly than to imply speedy motion. This means that I can reserve fast for going without food, rapid for noun-only use, and quick(ly) to describe the speed of something. (Don’t even THINK about telling me that quick can be a noun used to describe that part under your nail/cuticle, because it can’t.)

You can see from this example that we have a LOT of work to do if we’re going to clean up the English language from all this nonsense.

Staying within the “movement” theme: book. When I was in middle school, kids would say “He was bookin’” to describe that someone was running quickly. I really don’t know how a noun that describes written words got turned into a verb for quick running, but at this point do we really question the absurdity of our language? No, not when letter combinations like “doh” and “google” find their way into the dictionary.

Want something more topical? Shorty. Shorty typically means a slang term for someone of diminutive height. Now it describes a 140 character story/message on twitter (which is also known as a tweet – because apparently we need two names for the same thing, both of which already had definitions beforehand).

It’s pervasive. It’s everywhere. It’s time for a crusade against this despicable double-talk. Let’s get out there and book on down to the library and come up with a rapid way to stop the madness fast!