Language: Somethings use to "rock", now you "rock" somethings

Artist's rendition of shaggy curls that rock

For years, we've all heard the expression "it rocks". It's been a way of laying praise on something. One might say that LMT rocks or that  Pro8news rocks. However, it wouldn't be me saying that. But I digress. This morning I had a chance to watch some TV and was catching up on some of the "news". Having watched new House Speaker Boehner take the over-sized gavel from Nancy Pelosi several times, I skipped over a few more channels. One of the shows that was on was Rachel Ray. She happend to be talking about how more and more "men" are wearing makeup! Sure enough, some members of the audience volunteered as guinea pigs. Some hairdresser guy came on to experiment with an audience member's hair.

This is where the language thing comes in. Our ever-diminishing vocabulary was about to take a hit right before my eyes (ears). The hairdresser suggested a shag for one of the guinea pigs. Ray responsed, "But he's got curls....can you rock a shag with curls?" Wait, it gets worse. The reply from the hairdresser was- what else "Oh, you can totally rock a shag with curls!".

So now, you can say, not only that a shag rocks,  or even that a shag with curls rocks, but thanks to our  unequaled creativeness, now you can also rock a shag with curls.  How lucky can we be?   American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has said that language has a fixed set of rules but the content you can produce with it is boundless. Well, I venture to say he's right. I'm pretty sure that this is the first time in the  entire history of mankind that the phrase "Oh, you can totally rock a shag with curls!" has been uttered.