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by Jim Evans
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Friday, 21 March 2008 |
 SMART TALK
by Dr. Verbos
Metikulos
MASS MEDIA: By their
nature, the media are agencies of mass communication, so that
makes mass media redundant. But the advertising business, which also
thinks lite is acceptable, as well
as many who slept in English class, say that a media is newspapers.
Unredundant but ungrammatical. Doctors at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired have to
give patients a language lesson to clear up the problem.
One could almost say that our language is made up of spare
parts, and medium and media are Latin words, so they don't behave like English
words. Medium, like paramecium, is
singular. The plurals are media and
paramecia.
Pat Sajak, the very bright gentleman who runs the
not-so-bright Wheel of Fortune on TV,
recently presented a prize trip to Polynesia.
Very seriously, he looked into the camera and told the nation that a
single island is called a Polynesium.
Here at the Institute, we laughed for days, but I wonder how many Wheel viewers understood the wordplay.
I hope Mr. Sajak's joke will help you remember that
television is a mass medium. The
media are television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the
Internet. Mass media is redundant because the media always implies
that list, so "mass" is obvious.
But no, the plural of Tum isn't Ta, because Tums isn't
Latin.
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