Friday, February 08, 2008

Freakonomics, Grammarrgh!

There's a type of word we love: the portmanteau.

It's a word made of two blended together. Frathletic, for athetic frat boy. Funsanity, for fun and insanity (great on Friday nights!). And freakonomics, for freak and economics.

The Freakonomics blog in today's NYT has us freaking out, just a bit.

To an economist, then, it is no shocker that the average American now consumes almost 60 pounds of frozen potato products per year, more than triple the amount consumed per person in 1965.

And at the same time, we’re burning less calories. No surprise...

Doesn't that just sound barbaric? It should be FEWER calories, because you can (and probably should) count them individually. Burning less fat, and fewer calories. That's the American way.

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