Friday, September 12, 2008

Re-WHAT-ed?

A few months ago I discovered a new pet peeve. Oddly enough the pet peeve is a word. That word is repurposed. The only ways I've seen it used are when describing a new product made from an old one. The first time I saw the word the blog author was proud of herself for repurposing an old sweater into a stuffed monkey. I rolled my eyes and commented to my husband that the words remade or recycled would have been just as accurate and less...snobby. (At the time I was pregnant and highly hormonal, so that may have contributed to my hatred of the word.)


After I spent the afternoon steaming at what a stupid word it was (I really was hormonal) I tried to forget about it. I did a great job until last weekend when I worked the Womens Expo at UVU. One of the giveaways was a "Chocolate brown bag repurposed from Mexican candy wrappers." What? "Brown bag made of garbage" was what I read. I'm all about making something new out of something old to save money and reduce waste, I just take issue with using a word for it that seems to have been made up for the sole purpose of making the new product sound somehow better. Just my opinion. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go take care of the breast milk my daughter has repurposed.

1 comment:

Della Hill said...

So what you're also saying, if I may extrapolate on your words,
is that the english language has far too many words and most people are overly verbose in the use of their vocabularies simply for the purpose of sounding educated and intelligent.
How silly.