Don’t have a ‘staycation,’ just speak properly instead!
Imay well tootle along to Hays Travel in the coming days to book a foreign trip. We shall see. What I refuse to do is have a staycation. This is no slight against the fine destinations this island has to offer. Nor have I failed to notice the back-of-a-fagpacket flux in the rules of foreign travel.
It isn’t even to avoid association with the pious smugness of those berating visitors to (actually safer) Spain who “must have known” the rules would change as soon as they landed there (???).
No. It’s because “staycation” is a stupid word.
If indeed it is a word. Why does anyone use it? We used to simply say we would have a holiday in Britain.
Evidently that necessitated speech which was just too difficult. Have we reached a point in history where people are worn to a frazzle if they have to form too many syllables?
Why the rush to finish a sentence? Is there some emergency that people who speak properly haven’t been made aware of?
The, ahem, word, is a portmanteau of “stay” and “vacation”. Yet people aren’t staying. Scotland, for example, still qualifies as elsewhere. Generally, we don’t say vacation; we say holiday.
Brits deciding to use “vacation”, which is at least a word, sound silly. When Americans say it, it sounds fine. It’s Latin in origin, but now immersed by the US.
So if we don’t say vacation, why have we now been inflicted with the horrific verbal vandalism of “staycation”.
Slang is a wonderful thing, but we don’t have to import it. If you ask me to give a “ballpark” on this, I can’t help you as I don’t understand the question and have no intention of ever researching it. “Rain check”? Study precipitation to your heart’s content, just don’t include me.
Incidentally, you aren’t “dating” unless you’re counting the rings on a tree trunk, and “chilling” involves putting Tizer in the fridge.
That last one is particularly irksome as it leads to “chillax”; an even more horrendous portmanteau than staycation and ironically the least chillaxing “word” in existence.
So I might have a holiday in Britain, but a staycation is out of the question.