The Nerdy Bunch

(Sorry I missed last week. Had three presentations in eight days, hence no time to blog)

Growing up, I really didn't like my parents music. My dad - who usually has control of the stereo at my parents place - is mostly into jazz fusion (Weather Report, Blood Sweat & Tears, that sort of thing). Nowadays there are a few things we can agree on (Buena Vista Social Club, Jamie Cullum etc.), but mostly tastes still differ widely.

Oddly enough the only early memory I have regarding my parents' music is of a song they claim they've never had in their record collection. I vividly remember standing in our living room, complaining about my parents putting on that awful, awful record again, but until a few years could never actually place the song. Then, during one of my quiet-music phases, I started to get into Simon & Garfunkel. And lo, there it was!

So either my mom (who has a major inferiority complex when it comes to music, so it's not entirely impossible), secretly owned Simon & Garfunkel records, or someone stole the intro? I don't even know.


On to other things. A media prof on my feed tweeted that if he could ban one word from students' essays it would be “poignant”, 'cause they all used it incorrectly. So I got curious. I'd say my English vocab is pretty solid when I actually give a damn about speaking pretty, correct English (which, admittedly, isn't that often the case), but I rarely look anything up, meaning that “wrong” usage by native speakers (or “shifting usage” as my prescriptive grammar/language hating self would prefer to say) tends to sneak in quite frequently. So I grabbed my dictionary of choice, and was confronted with

poignant adj – making you feel sad or full of pity.

whut?
It happens a lot, as a non-native speaker learning by immersion, that you simplify meanings, or miss connotations of certain words. But I'd only taken "poignant" to mean something along the lines of "to the point" or "telling", so that one was way off, and I wonder if I just interpreted it incorrectly when I read it, or if it's so widely misused that from a non-prescriptive standpoint the way I used it wasn't actually wrong. I hate it when that happens. Dear English, I heart you, but I wish you weren't so darn complicated.

(hah, I just looked it up on the internets, and the internets agree with me. But I'm too lazy to write a new post, so there, you'll have to live with my “boohoo, I didn't know what 'poignant' means” rant. Sorry.)