Heidi attests:
My biggest peeve: I get really annoyed when journalists use “(pop. 200)” (or 29, or 400, or whatever) to underscore a town’s smallness. It’s overused like crazy, and vaguely condescending.
Heidi attests:
My biggest peeve: I get really annoyed when journalists use “(pop. 200)” (or 29, or 400, or whatever) to underscore a town’s smallness. It’s overused like crazy, and vaguely condescending.
I also hate “sleepy” as an adjective. People in small towns get just as much sleep as anywhere else.
I’d rather see the journalist give the population, though, than use some subjective identifier. A village or “small town” is something different to a Nebraskan than, say, to a New Yorker.
When the word “sleepy” is applied to a small town, it is used as a euphemism for the pitilessly accurate “sleep-inducing.”
Or maybe it’s because the town is still and quiet, as if asleep.