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Smart TalkSmart TalkSMART 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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