The thread on word usage that grates like blackboard fingernails...

Since it's playoff season and I'm spending more time being exposed to sportscasters' mutilation of English, I should be prepared for this stuff, but when the heck did "compete" become a noun and an adjective? 

For example, hockey players don't seem to compete any more, but instead "show a high degree of compete" or "play at a low compete level."

The other day I heard Pierre McGuire, the High Priest of Sportscaster Language Mutilation, call "forechecking" something like, "blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, at the point of attack."

And someone ought to tell Bill Waters that "penultimate" means "second-to-last", not "really, really good."

By the way, is "sportscaster" even a word?

I've been reading a lot of design project reports written by proto-engineers these days.  I don't blame them (I suspect their instructors), but they like to write "issues" when they mean "problems."

Another bunch uses "is cognisant of" instead of "knows" or "is aware of."

In terms of phraseology that has a disconnection with substance with reference to the recipient's ability to cognate substantive meaning from certain forms of utterance, mere passive interfacing with the actioner of these terms should be eschewed in favour of a boot to the head.

Nice use of a blackboard, M.

What would it take to fix the code on this forum, inserting a comma somewhere?  Is anyone looking into this?

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Today I saw a couple of post that had statements puncuated by question marks, as in, "I don't understand what you're saying?"

 

Is this something that's done in text-messaging, where one may want to indicate a question, without asking a question?

OK, now I see that oldgoat's doing it too, so it can't be some newfangled mode of writing:

"I wonder what his t-shirt would have said in the Mensa parade?"