little rant

I find it quite irksome when people who should know better "verb" adverbs or nouns. I just read an article that said, "... you can up your intake..." UP IS NOT A VERB, people!! Neither is lunch ("let's lunch"), Kohl's ("the more you know, the more you Kohl's"), and many more...

I remember in college, when I saw this on a t-shirt for one of the campus fraternities: "we've upped our standards, so up yours." It was funny then. And, they were fraternity brothers... they had an excuse. But this?!

I have seen this kind of grammatical suicide in news articles, magazines, on professional blogs... even have heard this on radio news. (I do not watch TV, so for all I know, it is happening there, too.) Is it laziness? simple lack of knowledge?! Are we allowing too much informality in our lives?