Beach what now?

I know this might feel more Baywatch, but for some reason—and I don’t know why—I think Charlie’s Angels.

I’m going to be on Vancouver Island in a couple weeks, and I’m starting to set up a series of shots out on the wild west coast.

I’m calling it Beyond Boudoir on the Beach, and of course, that’s eliciting the usual “You’re wrong. Boudoir means bedroom.”

Well, no, no it doesn’t.

If we’re going to be pedantic, Boudoir literally means “pouting room.” This was typically not a bedroom but a dressing room or private sitting room that was attached to a bedroom. These days, houses aren’t typically constructed with private sitting rooms

But here’s the thing: if we’re being pedantic, then most of the language we use is wrong.

For instance, that first word you used there. “You’re.” You are. Well, the word “you” was originally the word that was used to refer to multiple people. There’s only one of me, so the correct word to use is actually “thou”. (We talk about how English lacks a second person pronoun for multiple people. It doesn’t, it’s just been adopted as a singular pronoun, then co-opted to only mean that one thing.)

But you can’t say “thou’re”. There’s no such contraction. And to say “thou are?” That’s wrong, too. The correct word to use is beest. “Thou beest wrong” would be the right way to say that, pedantically.

But while I may have once been a pedant when I was younger, and still fight to overcome some of my most pedantic tendencies, I have come around to the point of view that language is not something locked in stone, and that it can change. Have you ever tried to read Shakespeare, or worse yet, Beowolf? Even things written a hundred years ago can feel … wrong.

here are ways that people use language that still get my cringe up. “I could care less.” Or “by in large” set my teeth on edge. And sometimes, I’ll correct people. “If you could care less, you should care less. In fact, you should be out of cares to give, so you couldn’t care less.” But I do that less often these days.

Just over the course of my lifetime, I’ve watched language change. Remember back in the day when the word podcast was invented? You might not, but it only came into use in 2004. At the time it meant a piece of media that was cast to an iPod. I’ve been listening to podcasts since 2005. I lived through Leo Laporte’s Quixotic battle to change the term to “netcast”, because “you can listen to these on more than iPods!”

These days, however, the usage has changed so that individual episodes are now “pods” and podcasts are pods in aggregate.

One of my favourite example of recent language change was a recent video by a professor, who decided to address a high school class in Gen Alpha slang. You can watch it below:

Now, I don’t expect the entirety of Gen Alpha speak to invade the language, but each generation brings with it a handful of terms that expand the definition of English. Or they’ll use a pre-existing term in a new way. For instance, we all know what the word “ban” means, as well as the word “shadow” but put the two together, and you have something different entirely.

All of this is to say, it’s okay for you to find me using the word boudoir to mean something other than a pouting room wrong. But it’s not okay to tell me that I cannot use it that way. Language is something shared between people. If I were to try to use the word boudoir to describe a small furry animal with whiskers and a long tail and nobody else knew what I was doing, you could say I was objectively using the word wrong, because it fails at communicating the idea.

But if I use the word boudoir to communicate the idea of intimate, sensual, romantic images, and then say “on a beach,” I’m sure you can follow me. There are certain concepts that follow the word around that imply this sense of sensuality.

So, if you’re interested in boudoir on the beach, I’ll be on Vancouver Island the weekend of June 14&15, plus a day or two on either side. Feel free to send me an email if you want to shoot while I am there.

And if you’re not down on Vancouver Island? I know a couple really cool spots around Fort St. John, too, so send me a note and lets figure out what works.

Also, yes, I really am this nerdy about words and languages. When I am not taking pictures, I am either out exploring the wilderness or writing.