Something that drives me bonkers, Part I

So I'm sitting here at work, eating tuna and Matzoh and wondering what I should post a blog about. My mind went from topic to topic (Lemons vs. Limes*, "Favorite" Movie vs. "Best" Movie**, Beautiful Actresses My Age Who Should and Might Actually Marry Me if They Only Knew I Existed***) when I finally decided to do what I usually do: complain. I'm good at it. Ask me about my Best Buy rant sometime.

But I'm not just going to complain. I'm going to complain with a purpose. I have the utmost hope that people will understand where I am coming from and do their very best to change, not for me, but for the good of the land, to quote Tenacious D.

Today I will complain about the usage of a certain word. Duck and cover; here comes the English graduate in me (hey, he's gotta be used for something).

"Breath" and "Breathe"

This is very simple. "Breath" rhymes with "death" and is a noun. A "breath" is what one takes into their lungs or mumbles under, or maybe offends people with after eating something particularly nasty. "Breathe" rhymes with "seethe" and is a verb. To "breathe" is to inhale and exhale.

You don't know how many times I've read the sentence "I can't breath." Yikes. How do you feel when you read the sentences "I can't coffee", "I can't paperclip", or "I can't Emancipation Proclamation"? You should feel as though your innermost soul has been offended. Mine does. You can't even do stuff like that in creative writing, where grammar rules can be broken with wild abandon. So please, for the sake of my innermost soul and the world itself, use "breath" as a noun and "breathe" as a verb. The "e" on the end changes the vowel sound from a short "eh" to a long "ee".

That's it. I know; not particularly witty, but something I've been meaning to get off my chest. I promise the next entry will be more entertaining.

...this is kind of a lame blog entry, isn't it? Here - for reading all the way to the end, you get to know that 8675309 (as in the song) is a prime number, xenon burns green, if a flatworm is taught to run a maze, ground up, and fed to another flatworm, that flatworm will be able to run the maze on the first try, and "stewardesses" is the longest word you can type with one hand on a normal keyboard.

So it's not a total loss.



* limes
** Run Lola Run & The Shawshank Redemption, respecively
*** Thora Birch