-ish

For those of you that know my stance against the use of "ish," you will find this amusing, I am sure. I received an email on Friday from a friend of mine that included the following quote and a link to this article.

"The exhausted secret-service guys, the secretaries of state, the chief of staff, the assistants and advisers and the press pool attempt a fitful sleep in the gray-and-beige reclining seats. Some give up the unequal struggle and order dinner. Not fantastic food, with decentish wine served by nicely uniformed, friendly waiters." - Time Magazine

There it is, in Time, "-ish." Well, I laughed and appreciated the email and moved on with my day. I had no concept of the humbling that was headed my way. As I headed off to lunch later that same day, I said to myself (I talk to myself a lot when I'm alone in the office for any length of time), "I am feeling quite peckish."

I was suddenly aware of the fact that I had just used the suffix "-ish." The moment I was back in the office I looked "peckish" up on the online dictionary and there discovered that "-ish" is an actual suffix used to make adjectives out of nouns: "1. with the sense of 'belonging to', 'after the manner of', 'having the characteristics of,' 'like'; addicted to,' inclined or tending to'; 'near or about' 2. with the sense of 'somewhat,' 'rather.' Similar to the suffix "-esque."

Needless to say I had a good laugh at my own expense and will probably stop ranting about the use of "-ish" from now on (seeing as I never bothered looking it up all these months AND I never noticed that I've used -ish for a long time: "feverish", "ravish", "English", "Swedish").

Though I still believe if you are going to be somewhere you should tell people when you are going to be there not "about" when.

Okay...I'm done.

"-ish." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 01 Mar. 2008.