What a difference a day makes…

A couple of satellite photos show what can happen in a very short time frame. Above we see the entire Central Valley of California obscured by the smoke of its roughly 1,000 wildfires. All the news agencies reported that air quality throughout the valley was “unhealthy.” I figured out why people say that word instead of the correct word, unhealthful. Go ahead, say the word unhealthful and you’ll find that the mouth has to work harder to say thf than to say ee. Kind of like the word ophthalmology. Phth is difficult to say, so it becomes op-tha-mology. As I blogged earlier, say goodbye to unhealthful. Locally, nobody says Huntington Lake. Hunnington Lake is what you hear. Constitution is my personal difficult-to-say word.

Today’s picture of California shows a sunny bright oasis of wonderful healthy air quality.

This brings me to another problem with our language, the use of terms such as “twenty-five-year anniversary.” To be correct, it is simply “twenty-fifth anniversary.” The term anniversary means the date on which an event took place in a previous year. Things fell apart when people started saying “This is our six-month anniversary.” Idiots. They make the word anniversary into a marker to be applied to any arbitrary chunk of time. Why is it that language only seems to deteriorate, not ateriorate? Is it because only dumb people become teachers, while the smart ones become bloggers? I believe what I’m saying is truthy.