Medical Marijuana Issue Returns to Court

Each time the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on medical marijuana, the justices have come down against allowing the sick and dying to use the drug to ease their symptoms and possibly prolong life.

Regardless of your opinion on the issue itself, wouldn’t you have to admit that this is a somewhat biased lead for a story being presented as news rather than as commentary? Granted, it’s not a Fox News level of bias or anything, but it’s a little more than I’d expect from a semi-reputable print publication, even one based in San Francisco.

Only two more days until we lose the giant fans in our office. Thursday night, just as we were leaving to go to dinner, the toilet tank in the office bathroom overflowed and didn’t shut off. In about five minutes, all the carpet within five feet of the bathroom (including the media closet) was soaked. I’m glad we caught it before it could do any more damage.

Fortunately, maintenance managed to get someone out here with an extractor that night, and we now have big fans blowing above and beneath the carpet to get it good and dry. I’m sure it will also get cleaned afterward, but I fear we’ll never have that “new apartment smell” again. It’s a good thing we’re planning to vacate pretty soon. All the same, I’ll miss this place. After thirteen years in a dingy San Francisco hovel with a cigar-smoking lunatic downstairs, it’s been really nice living someplace with appliances, plumbing that (usually) works, climate control, and a relatively pleasant aroma.

Anyway, we left the noisy fans behind and went to Winston-Salem on Friday and Saturday. We might have stayed the whole weekend and done more, ummm, shopping, but Mark had to be on a plane back to The City of Doom this morning.

I stand corrected, and by a member of the family at that. Apparently, “gift” actually is a verb common in legal documents for several centuries. Of course, legal terminology is somewhat unrelated to plain English anyway (by design, maybe?), but I apologize for my error. I will, however, continue not to use “gift” as a verb myself, because I find it just a little repulsive. As I’ve said before, the fact that you can do something doesn’t mean that you necessarily should.

I like our new mortgage broker. I really do. She’s friendly and helpful and she’s found us more money at a lower payment than we expected. I only have one problem with her: like so many Americans today, she seems to have forgotten that the word “gift” is a noun and not a verb.

One does not “gift” something to someone else. One gives something to someone else. A gift, for example.

It’s an annoying trend that I trace to recent news stories about the practice of “re-gifting”, or recycling unwanted presents by wrapping them up and giving them to someone else. Corporate types have been saying idiotic things like “let’s interface” and “can we dialogue?” for years now. However, I think the real root of this nagging tendency to turn nouns into verbs goes back to the heinous “new way to office” ad campaign used by Kinko’s about ten years ago. That one was quickly followed by California Pizza Kitchen’s “cool new way to pizza”, which was even worse.

Even so, I can see how one might be tempted to use “office” or “pizza” as a verb in a commercial, because there’s not really a comparable term. “Work”, for example, is a little imprecise, and “work in an office” is a little wordy. But why stoop to such liguistic abuse when there’s already an appropriate word like “give”? It bugs me on the same level as “orientate” and “orientated”, which some people have a tendency to use when they mean “orient” and “oriented”.

I’d really like to conversation with some of these people about the way they’ve been misbehavioring with resepct to the English language. But that’s something I’ve already statemented on many occasions.