I was watching TV last week, and started getting annoyed at some of the language used. No, not blue language, which I employ more often than someone with stage 4 Tourette’s. I mean trendy terminology (conversate) alongside old-timey “mom” words like (slacks).

Words that hurt my ears and make my spine compress:

• Conversate
• Healthfully
• Slacks
• Lamestream Media (thank you Sarah Palin)

Surely there are words that grate on your nerves, too, and I’d love to know what they are.

I’m Canadian. Please don’t judge me on that unfortunate birth defect.

When I was little, I developed an ear for accents. I realized that the people I grew up around talked funny – saying things like “eh, aboot, Tranna (Toronto)”… I hated it. Mostly though, I lived in fear of talking that way myself.

With a bit of determination, I taught myself to talk like a normal person – and I did it through the most valuable RosettaStone program imaginable: Audrey Hepburn movies.

English wasn’t Hepburn’s first language – she was Dutch. And being a) from Canada, and b) from Montreal, it was safe to say that English wasn’t exactly mother tongue to me either.

With the waif on my side, I elocuted my way through Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Paris When it Sizzles and more. Ironically, I never watched My Fair Lady, preferring Leslie Howard as Higgins in Pygmalion.

My dedication paid off. By the time I reached my late teens I was doing voice-over work, and eventually launched a hugely successful podcast.

I never say aboot. I never say “eh”, except ironically. My only “tell” is my pronunciation of the word sorry, which I pronounce sore-ee. Other than that, you’d think I was from Pennsylvania, not Canada.

Which is why I found this article on All Freelance Writing amusing.

It’s a joke on too many shows these days that the alien or the foreigner learns English by watching MTV or the equivalent. It might have been marginally funny the first time, but it’s way past time for that joke to be over, and the underlying message is actually rather dangerous for those who are trying to sound like professionals. It’s hard to learn real English from people who make money with catch phrases they probably didn’t even come up with themselves. “That’s hot….” Right.

Fair enough. Rebecca goes on to suggest novels as a better way of grasping the intricacies of English. While I tend to agree, I must say that at the tender age of four, I wasn’t able to slog through The Great Gatsby. Sabrina, on the other hand, never failed to delight.

I had these older friends – much older – who came to Canada to escape the Nazis. They spoke only German and a little Hungarian. Like me, they taught themselves English at the movies. Bogart was their professor of choice. While MTV may not be quite the patois one would want to acquire, I stand by Ms Hepburn (along with Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Tyrone Power) as a linguist worthy of a PhD.

I am as much a writer as I am white, or female, or anything else that I was born into. From the moment I could string letters together coherently, I was writing essays: A day in the life of the family Doberman, what our summer cottage meant to me, a letter to my best friend Marti. My goal, around age 10, was to run an underground newspaper. Seventeen years later I would start blogging.

When I was a corporate whore, I still called on my natural talents in my job. I would handle project documentation, training manuals or letters of complaint (my personal favorite). Without fail I would be applauded for these endeavors that were not immediately applicable to my work.

So when I lost my corporate job in early 2008, it was a natural transition to freelancing. Not an easy one, but a natural one. Unfortunately, 2008 and 2009 were the most horrible, chaotic years of my life. It was only for a few months on a friend’s Kansas farm that I was able to really form any sort of business.

Sadly, I tried and failed a few times. I was taking the wrong jobs, or messing up the right ones – I was green. Not to writing, but to the business of writing. And then when my world fell out from under me and I was living in a shelter for abused women, I knew it was do or die.

I have now been living on my own again for the past three weeks. In that time I have buckled down hard. I’m hustling daily, churning out work at a breakneck pace, and reaping the rewards. I’m going to be ok.

I was told by my husband for a year that I was a failure. That I was lazy. That I was malingering. That i wasn’t good enough.

Fuck you.

This is who I am. This is who I’ve always been. The only thing holding me back, apparently, was you. And me.

No more.

Where did this rant/post come from? This post at Freelance Folder. Fifteen reasons not to give up. So here’s another couple:

16. No one can make my decisions for me

17. This is who I am, and I love me

For the past four months, I have been living a nightmare I can’t wake up from. I know that the story is one that should be told, and I’ve sat down many times to try to write it all down.

It makes me cry.

Reliving the pain, the hurt, the shame of my experiences is gut-wrenching. There are days when I sit with my laptop, bang out a few paragraphs, and then just sit and ball for an hour.

Why tell the story?

Some of the greatest creators we’ve ever known created their masterpieces out of pain. They faced the hurt and made it into something the world could celebrate. Your pain doesn’t have to be for naught. The shame or hurt you faced could help another person better face their own trauma someday. If you have a story that must be told – even if it’s only to your laptop or diary – you must get the words out sooner or later, lest your creativity become malignant and hurt you further.

Facing the Pain

Short sessions are best. Like visiting a therapist, sessions shouldn’t go for more than an hour or two. Otherwise healthy catharsis can turn to melancholy funk.

Plan something joyful for afterward. Blow your nose, wash your puffy eyes, and take a walk in the sunshine. Pop your favorite comedy into the DVD player. Have lunch with a friend.

Don’t make a bad day worse. It can be tempting to use an already bad mood to get the painful words out. But this can run the risk of pushing you into a deep depressive mood. Wait until you can focus just on the one story.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is how a lot of web writers make money. If you look to the right of this article, you’ll see ads from Google. The magical wizards in the Google oracle take the text from my blog posts and decide – based on that text – what my readers might want to know more about or even purchase.

It’s a system that is beneficial to the reader who finds a new resource or product, the blogger (hi, that’s me!) who gets paid to have the ads (based on how often the ads get clicked), and beneficial to the advertiser who gains a new follower or buyer.

Oh, and naturally Google takes a cut, too! Because they find this system of advertising very lucrative, they have made it easier for everyone to get in on. The Google SEO Starter Guide will help the aspiring web writer and online worker get started with keywords and other SEO marketing tips.

Hat tip: Saad, who has a mini version of the guide available.

I read this funny post yesterday, on the extinction of words from the vernacular. It’s funny, when we’re a society that puts so much emphasis on saving every little bit of mold from extinction that we would let parts of our language fall away.

Here are some of the words.

Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else

Embrangle: To confuse or entangle

Exuviate: To shed (a skin or similar outer covering)

Fatidical: Prophetic

Fubsy: Short and stout; squat

Griseous: Streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey

Malison: A curse

Mansuetude: Gentleness or mildness

Muliebrity: The condition of being a woman

Niddering: Cowardly

Can you help save them? I think I can work niddering into a few conversations. C’mon people – pick a word and save it!