Word Wednesday: An Un-Effective Cop-out

I've complained before about using the word impact as a verb. Last night, the Consort mentioned a conversation he had had yesterday with a student. It seems that some people use impact as a verb because they can't figure out whether to use affect or effect, so they bypass the whole conundrum and use the icky, verbed impact, instead.

My response? No excuse. All that's required is a Web search (you know, the thing some college students do to find paragraphs to lift to "jazz up" their papers). You get a bucketful of results, many of them from university writing labs. Yes, some can be on the dull side (scroll down a bit to find it), but others are highly entertaining (or is that just me?).

Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away. At least, not until all the people like me are dead. (Even then, I will probably haunt the dreams of sloppy writers [considering there's no way I will have been good enough to get into anyone's heaven*].)



*Case in point: The three previous posts all use the word damn. Now, that's excessive, if you ask me.