Pet Peeve

I am annoyed by many of the linguistic foibles afflicting the bible belt of the American Midwest. Every time someone confuses borrow with lend I cringe a little bit inside. People who consistently confuse good with style well have the same effect. I know I am obnoxious when I continually harp on the grammatical difference between these words but a man has to have principles. Borrow and lend are not synonymous, good and well are not interchangeable. However, my biggest pet peeve concerning language is not related to grammar. It is the use of business terms out of context. Using phrases like synergy and other industry buzz words during everyday conversations is incredibly annoying.

What defines a bigwig in a corporate board meeting ostracizes him at a Phish concert. “Crunchy grooves” do not mesh with “advertainment”. My abhorrance for business speak breaking down the cubicle walls to the real world indicates my irrational dislike for phrases out of context. For example, I don’t like suburban, upper middle class kids quoting N.W.A records in their National Honors Society meetings nor corn-fed, Wisconsin bred middle schoolers talking about "shredding the gnar" like brahs and betties.

My aversion to transitional linguistics seems counter intuitive. I usually love all things liminal, or boundary straddling. Asian fusion cuisine, the emergence of extreme sports into mainstream culture, Huxley’s Brave New World and freshmen coeds.

I think my aversion to out of place colloquialisms might actually have everything to do with my love of transitionary artifacts. I love the aforementioned examples because they bridge two worlds, harmoniously finding a new niche. Snowboarding has been able to keep its soul while being pushed to new extremes in the glow of mass consumerism and Indonesian ingredients have benefited from high-end restaurateurs. Conversely, nobody benefits from hearing about “bo-go selling strategies” or “targeting Generica demographics” in the context of a rock concert.

Combining two opposing subjects creates conflict. Conflict is the foundation for any good narrative. Superman needs Lex Luther and Kryptonite; Dr. Jekyll needs Mr. Hyde; and The Giving Tree needed that greedy little kid. But, having business speak in about-the-town vernaculars takes it too far. Lastly, If I never hear the word synergy used outside of a boardroom it will be too soon.

Pet Peeve

Many people find it a pet peeve when people misuse grammar. Maybe someone says "good" when they should have said "well," or they said "stupider" when they should have said "more stupid" - my pet peeve is when someone corrects my or someone else's speech in these types of situations. To me there is nothing more irritating than a grammar snob who is disturbed enough by a misuse of words that they feel the need to publicly correct a violation of grammar. I understand that sometimes a misuse of grammar can get under the skin of even the simplest of people, particularly when someone expresses a word unknown to the present English dictionary, but the necessity to publicly denounce another person's intelligence is quite out of line. Even well educated people who know the rules of grammar will resort to a more casual use of rhetoric from time to time depending on the formality of the situation. In a formal situation, most people understand that grammar use is important because it speaks volumes about your intellect, but in more comfortable situations with friends and family, people should be able to use language they are comfortable with as long as their point is clearly represented. When someone says "I feel pretty good," everyone who speaks English understands the meaning. Is it necessary to correct someone aloud and say, "I think you mean well?" It doesn't make you any smarter or better of a person because you can point out when someone misuses "good," or makes up a word like "stupider," - a twelve year-old child could point out such obvious mistakes. To sum up my thoughts on this issue, I guess what I'm trying to say is that people who take their pet peeves with grammar misuse too far, represent my largest pet peeve of all.

"Easy = True"

It seems that logic is the language of cognitive fluency. Cognitive fluency, being how easy something is to understand, would be able to utilize logic in many ways. For one, with logic comes understanding, if something is misunderstood it must not have been logical, and the goal of having high cognitive fluency is for better understanding therefore logic and cognitive fluency go hand in hand since they both aim to achieve similar or the same goal.

I have never thought of simplicity to be something that humans lean towards but in a way it makes sense and in a way it does not and I think this article addresses both sides of that. Bennet shows this comparison by showing how disfluency can used as opposed to fluency. I like the use of this because it does not make humans seem as simplistic as they would if Bennet would have just used fluency, or simplicity, to describe the way that human minds work the best. This disfluency is used because it causes your brain to think more into something and makes you realize the opposite, or what fluency/simplicity would have made you realize. Bennet’s example of this is with writing down ways to succeed, he says that writing down 3 ways to succeed and writing down 12 ways to fail would equate in the outcome. I think this comparison is very logical because simply knowing ways to succeed gives you a mechanism to use to achieve success, but writing down many ways of failure makes one think of different situations and how one would have to solve those failures. I almost think that this would give someone more of an ability to succeed because they would be equipped to recognize failure and would then be able to fight it.

I do think that in a lot of situations though simplicity would work over disfluency. And Bennet gives examples of this and a lot of them come from media and why we buy the things we do or vote for the people we vote for as Bennet describes. Bennet later describes that we tend to lean toward things that are easier for us, for example rhymes can help us makes sense of things like the example of the aphorism where it was put into equivalent meanings but one rhymed and the other did not, the outcome was that people tended to choose the rhyming one as more true.

I thought the funniest part of the article comes at the beginning with the example of people investing in companies with simpler names. I actually think this may be a little inaccurate, it could play a bit of part but I don’t think it does entirely. I think something as important as investing money, something that can change your future, is not something that most people take or should take advantage of. However it may play a part in deciding between two things that are equivalent in every other way, because sometimes just picking one that your gut is telling you to pick is the best thing to do, and you r gut could be telling you to pick the most simplistic one.

Finally I really like the connection between fluency and familiarity, and how we sometimes strive for that familiarity in order to justify decisions that we make. People feel an attraction towards something that is familiar to them and I think that is just human nature because people become wary in situations that are unfamiliar to them because they do not know what to expect or how to handle some of those situations. The example that Bennet uses to show our appeal toward familiarity is with an experiment where people were just shown different stimuli and people choose the ones that they liked and it just so happened that the ones that people liked the most were ones that they were shown repeatedly.

Cognitive fluency goes much deeper then the surface when it comes to the way people think and people do not necessarily prefer fluency over disfluency in every situation. As we have seen it very much depends on the situation that people are in and what they want to get out of it. And maybe simplicity can be attributed to familiarity more then to itself alone. With all of this information it is easy for one to see that our minds are very complex and having concrete answer to the questions of how they think about things, how they decide or choose things, or why we make the judgments that we make is not possible.