As someone who cares about words and how we use them, I'm troubled by the trend of people making words shorter for no other reason than using a different term.
For example, in certain business circles or certain people use the word, "vacay," to stand for "vacation." First off, the former bastardization sounds goofy. Just think of someone saying to someone else that they're "going on vacay." Does shortening the word by one stinking syllable really help people? I think not.
The other one I've seen in sports media that I don't like is the term "presser" for "press conference." The two-syllable term doesn't really approximate the two-word term. I guess "er" is in the word "conference," but "er" is nowhere near anyone with a right mind would abbreviate the full word of "conference." If anything, it should be "presscon" if there really is a need for shortening the language, which there isn't.
At the hotel we stayed at this weekend, the brand name of the toilet paper was "Comfort Bay," which is ironic. There's nothing comforting about those sandpaper-like sheets as you try to wipe your butt.
We are in Galesburg, Illinois and had lots of time to kill, so we checked out the campus of Knox College. Since we're baseball people, we looked at the college baseball field, which has some serious dimensions with short corners and 400 feet to straight center.
The dimensions reminded me of what I've read about Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, the home of the Cardinals and the Browns at one time. Its dimensions were quite unique with all kinds of distance markers. For example, the left field line was at 351 feet and right field line at 310. True left center was 379 with deep left center at 400. Deep left center field corner was 426 with true center at 422.
Those dimensions are nowhere as bizarre as what was going at the Polo Grounds: left-field line at 279, left-center at 450, center at 483, right-center at 449, and right-field line at 258.
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