Those of you who read my blog are aware that one of my biggest pet peeves is the misuse of language, and this one came to me today. I wanna know what the name “Suicide Hotline” pertains to. Crime fighters do what their names say, they fight crime, so theoretically, wouldn’t a suicide hotline do the same thing? As in, it would ENCOURAGE people to call and say they’re committing suicide and look for ways to? If you want people to NOT do that, call it an ANTI-suicide hotline. It’s AGAINST suicide. Sure, you can’t fit all that in a phone number, but just put it as the name of what it is over the number in the phonebook.
It’s like the term rewind. We don’t need the term rewind, we already have reverse. We have forward, and reverse, and fast forward. Isn’t that forward is? You can’t make something go FASTER. You can’t make life fast forward. It goes forward! And rewind doesn’t even have a PARTNER word! It’s just rewind, there’s no wind, what’s a wind? There’s no need for it. Let’s try and pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on! Suicide hotline is stupid, it needs to be “ANTI”, and we should kill it. Or better yet, let’s make it kill itself. Hey, it’s only natural.
m@rk
