I. Don’t. Like. This. Trend.

It’s interesting to see how certain trends become popular in our culture today. At the same time, though, it’s also frustrating if I am not a big fan of some of the trends.

For example, I am constantly seeing people using periods in order to create emphasis in a sentence. I understand why they do it and I suppose it is working for them, but it’s still annoying.

Someone may write “This. Needs. To. Stop.” or something like that to try to cleverly emphasize what they are saying, but what I see is “Sen. Tence. Frag. Ment.”

You know what’s not a sentence? “This.” Similarly, “Is.” is not a sentence. You can’t just throw whatever punctuation you want around in order to try to make a point.

If you really want someone to pause for emphasis, why not use a comma? “This, needs, to, stop” is still annoying, but at least it makes a little more sense than the periods.

Or what about our old friend the ellipsis? “This…needs….to…stop,” has a nice pause to it.

How about a semicolon? “This; needs to stop,” would also gain attention and make people think for a moment about if you wrote that correctly or not.

Or best of all, why not try an exclamation point? It adds emphasis, which seems to be the main point of this anyway. “This needs to stop!” That makes sense, unlike a bunch of words with periods after each of them.

In addition to that trend, here are a few others that have been annoying me recently:

The terms SCOTUS, POTUS and worst of all, FLOTUS – I can’t stand these acronyms. First of all, you sometimes have to think about them in order to remember what they mean. Also, it’s not saving you much time to say POTUS instead of President, or FLOTUS instead of First Lady.

Also, if people are trying to be super official with these titles, shouldn’t they be SCOTUSA, POTUSA, and FLOTUSA”?

What about the Speaker of the House? Why doesn’t that individual get one? I think the acronym would be SOTHOROTUSA.

The definition of insanity – I constantly hear commentators, especially sports commentators saying “The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different results,” in order to sound clever. You know what? That’s not the definition at all. The definition of insanity is “a severely disordered state of the mind usually occurring as a specific disorder.” I understand their point, but it is annoying to hear them constantly saying this.

To me, the commentators are actually referencing the definition of perseverance. If someone tries something over and over and it finally works, they will praise that person or team and extol the virtues of perseverance, a strong will and toughness. If they try something over and over again and it does not work, though, then it is somehow insanity.

Jim Carrey’s paintings – I think Jim Carrey is very funny, I love several of his movies and he seems like a smart and good person. I think his paintings are interesting, too. But it seems like every week he has a new political painting that is getting is getting attention on the national websites.

What must other painters think of this? I know nothing about art, but are his paintings better than the other paintings, political or not, that are out there? How does he make them all so fast? What happens to them after they make national news each week? Are people buying them? If every famous person starts painting, are those paintings going to become national news, too, or are his different?

Things being lit – This one more just confuses me more than anything. I understand that being lit is apparently a good thing, but how did this term come to be? Is it because it is “on fire” or “hot”? What would the next step up from lit be? Embers? Inferno? What is the opposite of lit? Extinguished? Cold? “That outfit is smokey!”

How does English lit fit into this discussion? Most importantly, how will I know if something I do or wear is lit? Am I told old to do something lit? In order to know if something is lit or not, should it have to pass a litness test?

The dog waking me up early every morning – Why won’t Scooter sleep later? Doesn’t he understand it’s not time to eat or go to the bathroom yet? Why does he do the same thing every morning? Does that mean he’s insane? He should know that it makes me tired and cranky so that I end up complaining about paintings, punctuation and even the FDOOF (First Dog Of Our Family). I don’t like this!