Today’s post is about bad words.  Yes, there are bad words and no, they aren’t always of the “four-letter” variety.  These are words that you shouldn’t ever, ever use in professional writing.

Firstly.

Might as well start here, since it’s um, first, right?  Words that have “ly” added onto them are adverbs, which is to say that they refer to a verb, or an action.  Like “quietly”, as in “he walked quietly across the room.”  So, if you start a paragraph, such as a how-to article, with “firstly” – what does this mean?  To which verb are you referring?  That’s right, no verb at all. 

So use “first”.  Please.  Firstly makes you sound, I don’t know, thirsty?  Desperate?  Uneducated?

“Lastly” comes under this same heading.  Avoid it.

Loose and lose.  Oh wait, we covered this already.  Still a pet peeve.

Moot and mute.  Mute means “silent”, moot means “obsolete” or “it doesn’t matter”.  A moot point, therefore, means in modern-speak “yeah, right” or “whatever”.  A mute point is, I suppose, a silent point?  Ergo, don’t use “mute” in this manner.

Daunting.

Egads.  Daunting.  One of the most over-used words in English.  Everything, folks, cannot be “daunting” or we’d all be frozen in fear every minute of the day.

By definition, daunting means “overwhelming or intimidating”.  Like maybe attempting to run a marathon with no training at all…well, that might fall under “stupid”.  Okay, let’s say you HAD to climb a 40-foot tree to rescue a kitten or something, and you were the only one who could do this.  That would be daunting.  Having to clean your kitchen, or discipline a child?  Really?  You might want to get out of the business of child-raising, or forget having a clean kitchen.

Clothes and cloths

You wear clothes, you clean that “daunting” kitchen with cloths.  Not rocket science, just use an “e” when the word calls for it.

Breathe and breath

Same thing.  Use the “e”.  You breathe whenever you take a breath.  Simple.

Basically, I’m saying to think before you write.  Or at least proofread before you show your work to anyone – and yes, I’m talking about status updates and Tweets too!

Tune in next week for a refresher/rant about punctuation….

I see a lot of words on the Web.  A lot.  Now, I’m no fan of textspeak, but it does have its place.  In texting; in Facebook status updates?  Not so much.  In actually writing?  Not at all.

Sometimes it’s hard to resist the urge to make corrections on those seemingly ignorant keystrokes that result in near-unreadability:

“Tomarrow is the big day!”  What the heck is this, a cross between a moment of time and a tomato?  That’s what it looks like to me.  C’mon, people, this is basic spelling: To.  And morrow.  Tomorrow.  Marrow is a substance inside bones.

“I like this to!”  To?  To what?  Do you like this to eat?  Or to wear?  What do you like it to do?  Oh, you must mean you like this “also”, or that you “also” like this.  That would be “too”.  “I like this too!”  In fact, you like it so much that you actually double the “o”. 

“My paper is do today.”  Do what?  Say what?  Is your paper going to do something?  If you write that paper like this, you will probably get a bad grade.  “Due” means a time of reckoning, a due date if you will; something is scheduled to be turned it or recorded or whatever. 

“I no you from high school.”  Um, did you actually GO to high school?  Or is this caveman-speak for “I don’t know you”?  A derivative of this is “I new that!”  or “I got a knew car today!”  Really?  Cool – a car that knows things!

Truely.  Drop the “e”.  Yes, definitely drop the “e”.

“I loveeeeeeee you” or, as it’s most often used, “I loveeeeeeee u!”  This says, aside from the most obvious misspelling, that you “lovie” me when you probably actually mean that you love me, with wild exaggeration.  So if you absolutely have to emphasize “love”, use caps or something…anything.

“Imma gone kick your butt” or some version thereof.  “Imma”?  I presume that this means “I am” which of course sounds nothing like “Imma”.  Unless it’s pronounced with a long “I” in which case it still doesn’t sound like “I am”; I suppose if you add an apostrophe after the “I”, making it “I’mma” but…naw, really, don’t use this unless you want to sound like an idiot.

As for the second word in that phrase, “gone”, what’s up with that?  “Going to” is the proper replacement, or even “gonna” for heaven’s sake, which has made inroads as commonly accepted slang.  Actually, if you think about this, “Imma gone” kind of sounds like a person named Imma is gone, has left, has died, whatever.  Be sure to say it slowly, with a sad face.

Past and passed.  Time in the past has passed.  Get it?  Let’s try this: past as in “it happened in the past”; passed as in “Aunt Norma passed away”.  I suppose, if Aunt Norma passed away last month, you could say she passed away in the past.  Or maybe that was Aunt Imma.