You know what word I hate with a loathing reserved only for leggings and reality television shows? “Vacay.”

“It’s vacay time!” “Who’s going on a vacay?!” “I need a vacay!” No, no, you need an English usage class. I need a vacation.

There should be a law against cutie-poo word abbreviations squirreled into the conversations of college students and young urban moms whose skinny thighs still look inexplicably good in a pair of leggings designed for twelve-year-old girls.

Um. ?What was I talking about? Oh yes, thigh-envy. NO WAIT. THAT WASN’T IT. Word-amputation. That’s the one.

The English language is one heck of a confusing thing to wield properly, even without foreshortening and creating new locutionary versions of it. Ask anyone who has had to learn it as an adult. Or who took Sophomore English. The thing makes no sense at all in its grammatical form. English is a mass grave of old Anglo-Norman-Germanic-Latin expressions, saddled with a whole lot of rules to keep it in line, all of which are excepted at one time or another. Meaning, all the time. There is no need to complicate things for our non-English-speaking brothers and sisters by inventing midget-words whose origin is Cutie-Poo-ish. It’s just not nice.

Look at the following sentence, for example. Can you make head or tail of it? Would you be able to if you had never heard English outside of your Rosetta Stone earphones?

“My BFF was tots jelly of my vacay to Hawaii. But she’s adorbs and loves me, obvi, so it didn’t last long. Ridic to think she’s not my favori peep forevs.”

Excuse me while I fumigate my frontal lobe. Literally, I read or hear those bon-mots and my skin starts peeling off. I don’t even really know why, come to think of it. Maybe because it is mostly adults I hear spouting these amazeballs expressions. And since said expressions seem designed for elementary school lexicons, it bugs to hear them coming from a grownup mouth.

Or maybe I’m just really clueless and don’t want to admit it.

My college kid sent me a note telling me that I “tots” needed to meet her for something. I spent half the day thinking she wanted me to bring her a bag of Ore-Ida tater tots. Which I then spent a while trying to talk her out of, given their artery-slapping oil content. Pretty sure my kid got eyestrain from rolling them whilst trying to get me to understand what she was telling me. In the end I thought the word “tots” and she were cute. But only because she is my kid, and only because she did it just once.

I don’t know. I mean, who is really to say what’s right and what’s wrong when it comes to language? Can I live with “obvi” “tots” and “noms” in the face of such growing and egregious word misuse as the transposition of “less” and “fewer”? Or should just not worry about any of it?

Eh. I’d rather leave my blood pressure in the healthy zone. So for now, I guess I tots couldn’t care fewer.

Janiel Miller is an American Fork resident and a columnist for the Citizen. Read more from Janiel at http://www.janielmiller.com.

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