A plea:

[conuly]

Please, please, please, if you're going to kill yourself....


Well, don't kill yourself, that's first. I don't want anybody I know (or, for that matter, anybody I don't know, but I doubt people I don't know care about my opinion) to kill themselves.



But if you are going to kill yourself, and if my request that you not do that is going to go unheeded, then, at the very least, don't kill yourself by hanging.

Because, if you do, the newspaper will inevitably say that you have hung yourself, and my internal red pencil will pipe up as I read it to say "NO! HANGED! GET IT RIGHT!" and then I'll feel incredibly insensitive. And with good reason, because it is insensitive, and the only justification is that you don't know what I'm thinking (unless I post this entry, that is) and anyway, once you're dead my thoughts can't harm you anyway, but still. Hung instead of hanged makes baby Jesus cry, it really does, and it makes me cry too. And then I just feel like I should feel something other than a desire to edit people.

Plus, I feel like a hypocrite. I know, I know, language changes, and I believe that, I really do... but I can't help it.

It just makes me feel bad all over, aside from the fact that suicide is a depressing thing to begin with.

So, to recap: Don't do it, and especially not by hanging.

Thank you.

(Also, don't make posts at ungodly hours. I doubt this post makes much sense.)

Edit: By the way, I don't know what dictionary you (dear anonymous person whose bloggings I've anonymously read) are reading, but mine clearly states that "rhythm" has two syllables, not one. I know, I know, we only write it with one vowel, but we also write island with an s, and that doesn't mean anything either. People very rarely read before they speak, and clearly they speak rhythm with two syllables. I'm not sure how you could make it only one anyway....

Comments

[ironychan.livejournal.com]

Allow me to be the first to quote Maskerade:

"Did they tell you Dr. Undershaft was strangled before he was hung?"

"Hanged. Men are hanged. Dead meat is hung."

"Really. Well, Dr. Undershaft was strangled. And then he was hung."

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

::points and giggles::

[conuly]

!!!!!

[conuly]

I once had a five or six minute long conversation with a four year old trying to explain to her why she had not hanged her doll, but had merely hung it. I understood the futility of this conversation, and even the unfairness of it all, but it was just morbid. Not to mention, of course, incorrect, but that pales in comparison to the fact that it was (did I say this yet) outright morbid and creepifying.

I don't think she got the point, but she did stop saying hanged.

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

LOL. Well, I think part of it is that four year olds don't always know all the past tenses that don't end in -ed. But yeah, morbid and creepifying. o_O

[conuly]

That's exactly it, and why I realized I was wasting my time.

See, first I started off telling her "Don't say hanged, say hung". And if I'd left it at that, I might not have had to talk for however long it was, but I didn't like giving incomplete information. I won't even tell people that "affect is a verb, and effect is a noun" because that's sometimes not true! So I was sitting there trying to explain when you can say hanged, which is where my troubles started. And it just snowballed from there.

[tsukikage85.livejournal.com]

What's the difference?

[conuly]

If somebody is hanged, it means, generally, "by the neck until dead". I suppose you could use hanged if the person was rescued in the nick of time, but not actually killed, but that's about it.

Hung means the person was strung up in some other, non-lethal way. If they're already dead, they'd be hung. Though, I suppose, if they're already dead and you hang them up from a noose as though they were being killed that way, you might also say they had been hanged. I don't think there's a precedent for common usage of the word in that sense, though, but it's kinda like hanging them in effigy, except without the effigy part, right?

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

LOL oops.

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

And, to complicate matters, you've got methods of hanging a person that do not involve the neck, but are probably lethal anyway. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there's a scene where Leatherface spikes a girl onto a meat hook -- now, she didn't die on the hook, she died in a chest freezer, but if she had died (which is quite possible), was she hung on the hook, or hanged on it?

I'd go with the former, myself, but I don't have a particular reason for that.

[worldmage.livejournal.com]

I would tend to agree. For me, it's becaused "hanged" is the term used for the method of execution, and I've never really heard it used any other way. Just stringing someone/thing up on a hook would still qualify as "hung".

[dr-graffenberg.livejournal.com]

That one doesn't bother me nearly as much as these three:
1. "Irregardless." Why, just why??
2. "I could care less." No, you couldn't care less, if you could care less then you wouldn't find the need to talk about it.
3. The one that has been bothering me the most lately... "could of, should of, would of, etc.." Why does it seem that the majority of people use 'of' instead of 'have' these days? I understand that the 've' in could've can kind of almost sound like 'of' but it's not. What was that, third grade learning, maybe fourth. What is with people? Were we always this illiterate and it's just the internet that's exposing it more or are people getting dumber as time passes. Or is the fault of the schools? Arrgghhhh!
Ha ha.

[conuly]

2. "I could care less." No, you couldn't care less, if you could care less then you wouldn't find the need to talk about it.

Sometimes people claim sarcasm, but honestly, I always think that if you're going to be sarcastic, you should really be over the top in it.

Were we always this illiterate....

Well, yes. The expectation of universal literacy is really a new idea.

[conuly]

Was she hung by the *neck* on the meat hook in such a way that she suffocated, or her neck broke?

[sayga.livejournal.com]

on top of "could of" my husband gets the past participle wrong, and says (rather, he USED o before i got on his case about it) stuff like "i could of went." that really makes my brain hurt!

irregardless drives me nuts too!!

[carlanime.livejournal.com]

You beat me to it--I was just going to quote that!

[conuly]

!!!!!

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Irregardless makes my brain itch.

One that I've been encountering lately is confusion between diffuse and defuse. I watched a training video that advised us to diffuse a conflict, and watched a show where the subtitles stated that someone had diffused a bomb.

Homonym confusion irks me. It's almost on the same level as people who don't spell signs correctly (advertising "sandwitches" and the like).

[conuly]

Words like diffuse and defuse, I *don't* pronounce alike, though. I say them slightly differently, probably because I read them before I ever heard them. It always surprises me when people spell words like that wrong - did they hear them first, and then read them later? I always seem to have learned new, less common words (not that either is uncommon, but how often do they come up in conversation) out of books, not the other way around!

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

In both cases, the word was pronounced "de fuse", not "diff use". I don't know why the subtitles were wrong. There was no excuse.

[gingembre.livejournal.com]

AAAaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh "loose some weight". BOY does that get to me!

I read of people "nursing discretely" all the time too. Gah.

Side note: am I the only person to use "lit" as the past tense of light now?

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

As in, "I lit the candles because I wanted the scent to permeate the room"?

[conuly]

Yes, and that's how I say it too.

Though it may be that lit is the newer form. I know I was shocked and horrified to find out that "dived" is apparently standard and "dove" a modern dialectical variation - I always believed I said it "right", and everybody else couldn't speak properly! (Inasmuch as I think there's a proper way to speak, that is, etc. etc. etc.)

[sayga.livejournal.com]

There's a drycleaner I pass on the way to work that advertises, "Hem's while you wait." I desperately want to scratch off the apostrophe from their window painting.

[pne.livejournal.com]

on top of "could of" my husband gets the past participle wrong, and says (rather, he USED o before i got on his case about it) stuff like "i could of went."

Where's he from?

Because I just recently happened to read something which mentioned that "went" is the form of the past participle in, I think it was, West Country speech in south-west England - where it's not slovenly usage but merely the natural development from the verb "wend" and its past participle.

In which case I'd be inclined to say not "he gets the past participle wrong" but something like "forms the past participle in a different way compared to standard English".