Friday, April 17, 2009

a momentary lapse of perspective

We return to the world of crapspeak to take a look at one of the finest creations to emerge from this foundry of neologism: the lazy verbose template approximated as "from a/an X perspective." The irony is that it represents anything but the perspective referred to. The variety of values that X can be assigned is astounding; consider programming, finished, usability, scrolling, development, management, QA, sanity, risk analysis, testing, performance. The list is endless; the pit is bottomless; the effluvium is eternal. What may not be obvious is just how these alternatives refuse to want to be strong adjectives. An adjective is what "X" should be, not some posturing noun or noun phrase (or some other part of speech that attempts a competent imitation of an adjective). Crapspeakers have long since decided to strip the phrase of its true purpose (to qualify a perspective) and bandy instead a tasteless aurally annoying stream of verbal diarrhoea that makes your brain cringe with repulsion. Has the crusade for a fresh perspective been abandoned? Or is it no longer fresh from a battle perspective?

No comments:

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.