the oh-no! DVD of the week: ‘G Fight: The Best of Women's Mixed Martial Arts’

Why is this an "oh-no!" video?

More of an "oh no!" pull quote.

I'd disagree with the Girls Gone Wild comparison. It's not like the girls are drunk or high when they're fighting. Aside from the (hopefully) spell-check induced error, the rest of that description isn't even remotely insulting.

Hmm, I reread it just to be sure and I take that last sentence back. Clearly the person writing it had only peripheral connections to the English language. How can something be the most ultimate? Increasingly stronger? I understand that advertisement means making things seem bigger and better, but couldn't they have used exclamation points instead?

"gladiatrix"

Seriously?

(And, since it's plural, wouldn't it be gladiatrices?"

Gladiatrixi.

(I'm nearly certain that plural is horribly incorrect Latin grammar, but I don't care.)

Megumi Fujii makes pancakes and breaks ankles.

Well, mostly breaks ankles.

I'm a little torn, because the traditionalist in me wants them to be wearing martial arts uniforms, but at the same time the male mixed martialists are also dressed more like boxers than martial artists. And look, ooo, abs of steel.

Yeah, I'd say the problem with this ad is the abuse of English, not of women. If they themselves noticed, they probably figure their main demographic for watching mixed martial arts wouldn't. But now I'm getting flashbacks; if they'd had women's mixed MA fights back when I was in college, my g/f probably would have signed up.

Well, matrix is pluralized as matrices, so dominatrix would be dominatrices, and gladiatrix would be gladiatrices. Of course, the latter isn't even a word.

I'm just being a quibbling nitpicker, I know, but I can't resist.

According to the online Merriam Webster dictionary, "gladiatrices" is the valid plural of "gladiatrix," which is a word - borrowed directly from Latin - meaning "female gladiator."

I agree that "most ultimate" is bad English, but even if it weren't, I should still wonder why exactly mixed female martial arts should be more ultimate than any other kind. Because men, or unmixed women, don't fight to the death, whereas these do? The same applies to "purer"; after all, pure generally means unmixed, so all-women MA should logically be purer than MMA.

Grinebiter: the "mixed" refers to being allowed to use any martial art, not it being co-ed. I don't watch a lot of MMA shows on my own, but I had friends in a kung fu club who did, and watching them (and the show) was interesting.

In the early days, a guy named Tank Abbot made it all the way to the final round on sheer aggression. His training method was to go bars and pick fights; he was built like a sumo wrestler. He bulled his way through all the hard style fighters (punching and kicking arts) until a judo guy pinned him. In another tournament, a weight lifter who took six months of jujitsu fought his way to the quarter finals. I found those examples humbling as a martial artist. And 2/3 of the fights were won by grappling moves, only 1/3 by knock out. So these days all the MMA fighters are more muscled and study both striking and grappling. That's evolution for you.

@Paul: Thanks for the heads-up, shows how much I know about it. Mutatis mutandis, my point about "pure" remains, though -- the word ought to mean a single art.