Idiots who destroy the language and who also happen to be in a position of being heard and trusted by a very great many.
Howard Cosell is probably my most loathed ignoramus whose only skill was bastardizing the language. Any damn fool who could move a ball fro point A to B was a PrOOOoooOOOoooOOOoooOOOooooooofessional.
God I hate that man.
A professional is a person who has sworn to some higher purpose like medicine law god etc.
It doesn't mean he is any damn good at anything or even particularly dedicated. It means nothing about income at all and absolutely nothing about dress or conduct. But once Cosell got his empty head around that poor friggin word, the nation seemed to want to utilize it for more bastardy.
Which brings me round to another word that is being bastardized by the famous and pitifully uneducated Joe Rogan. Utilize. He uses it every god dammed time he wants to say that a fighter used a technique in the manner in which it was intended. Which is not what the word utilize means at all. He uses it because he's an ignoramus and wants to sound smart, so he has latched onto a polysyllabic term and misuses it every time he utters it and he utters it rather too much. Utilize is used when one wants to connote a mis-application of a thing. Like picking up a micrometer and working it like a hammer. That is utilizing the micrometer. It might work and it might not do any damage, but the micrometer was not intended to be a hammer.
Now if one uses the micrometer to measure something then it is being used. Used is the invocation of a thing for it's intended purpose.
Cosell, Rogan and a host of others, why do ignoramuses survive?