When I wrote in my first blog about "purity of language" I was wistfully considering a time when we simply wrote or spoke with clarity and carefulness. Too much of today's speaking and writing is rife with errors of spelling and grammar and, additionally, abused by wasted words and an unwillingness, it seems, to check and re-check for possible errors.

Let me give one example of the latter, then a couple of entries illustrating the former.

On today's "opinion/editorial" section of Yahoo News there is a link to an article with this title:

"For Obama, Taxes Are About Fairnes" (exact duplication, italics mine). When you click on link to the actual Wall Street Journal article, the highlighted word is spelled correctly. My point is simply that, even among major media outlets, there is little attempt to be careful about spelling and word choice. Perhaps there are not enough proofreaders working for Yahoo or those who are employed are not being alert.

The wasting of words most often comes in the form of "fillers". They abound everywhere, but especially in verbal communication. "Um", "uh", "like" and "you know" are most frequently chosen when, if we were thinking of clarity in our conversations or speeches, we would be better served, as would our hearers, if we thought through what we wanted to say prior to opening our mouths to utter such nonsense. As an example, (and the use of this example does not mean to indicate that Democrats are more prone to such waste than Republicans) today I heard a clip of a speech given about two weeks ago by Mr. Obama which lasted approximately 40 minutes and contained 7 and one-half minutes of "um" and "uh" and "you know" phrases.

What I long for is clarity of language (purity, if you're a purist) and an honest attempt to screen our words before they are put down on paper or on the internet or before they are uttered, never to be retrieved.

Any thoughts waiting to be expressed with clarity and carefulness, minus the fillers?