I Am Dejected That Deject Is A Word.

I was doing another word puzzle and I was fighting with all my might not to write J in between the DE and the ECT. F was out, T was obviously impossible, but it could not be J. Deject is not a word, it is another example of thinking something is a word because another word sounds like it has a suffix.

Well, I might be wrong. Apparently (according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary) it was first used in the 15^th Century, but it is inspecific about how it was used, and it thus may have been, as I suspect, actually dejected. And it was used by someone on CNN, but we all know that American usage of a word is no indication of anything in terms of the English language.

Anywho, in the absence of definitive and accurate proof that someone in authority over the English language i.e., someone who can spell colour has ever used deject in a rational sentence not solely designed to prove the word exists but in the normal run of communication, I continue in my objection. Oh Good Grief, I can hear them now, a million different Gen?’s using the word deject as a replacement for the word depress because no one has ever explained to them that the whole synonym/antonym thing is not exact because many words have nuanced meaning.  Pretty has nuances of youth and femininity that beautiful doesn’t’, for example. Dejected is not the same as depressed, I mean they cover a lot of the same ground but there are situations that are better prescribed by one or the other, depress as a clinical term, dejected has connotations of a more urgent desperate but shorter timeline than depressed.

And I am not blaming the young people. I mean how can they be expected to know something that apparently many primary school teachers are oblivious to. Listening to teachers rattle off synonyms and declaring they all had the one meaning. It took all my control not to rush the assembly stage and shake that crazy woman by the throat screaming ‘they are not all interchangeable, they are not the same words.’

Apparently, the importance of teaching children to use different words was more important than actually introducing them to the precision of our language. Dulling down our communication until we have to think of new ways to delineate between subtle differences. That is how language evolves. Evolution through misunderstanding and popularism. Mmmm, I wonder why I, as an autistic person, would be upset that a societal basic should be changeable due to completely random factors?

People expect young people to know things that they have never heard of. This is how we are destroying the world. The more commonly known something is the more people think that they don’t have to explain the thing. Why don’t more people have keepers? Because the keepers would be people. Randomness is pecking your society apart and you don’t care because you can instinctively adapt and we can’t, but you don’t care what happens to people who aren’t you.

I was going somewhere.

Oh yes deject. Dejected is a word. Because it ends in ‘ed’ people assume it is the state resulting from the verb deject. Therefore, by inference create the word deject, which as far as I can tell is not actually ever used.

Within the next decade people will be ‘jecting’ others. ‘Ject’ to be cheerful, the ‘de’; meaning opposite, having been removed.

There is dejected and dejection and I think that’s it.

I am really incensed by this. I mean I had a fight with my daughter during which she successfully proved I am a failure not just as a mother but as a human being. My family is in crisis and my pets are a disobedient rabble. There are wars and extinctions and environmental atrocities. But what really, really sets me off is misuse of the Queen’s English.

Of course, the Queen is English. Ba dompt boom.

No, old jokes aren’t enough, I remain dejected.