When I count my blessings, one that always lands high on the list is that I’ve been able to make a good living working with the English language. It entertains me endlessly. I can while away an hour at Dictionary.com just as easily as I can at Wikipedia.
English has a broad duality about it. One side of it is delightfully open-ended. Some words have scores, even hundreds of synonyms. Some connote slightly different things; others are identical except that they are, of course, different words. Meanings shift, and words fall in and out of favor. It’s never the same language from one day to the next. This is something to celebrate, not decry. Poetry and theater are born here. Idioms gain traction here. George Carlin made his rent on this side of the linguistic tracks.
The other side of English is rigorous. Whatever it is, chances are excellent there’s a word that exactly describes it. Unfortunately, meanings shift on this side too, and it bothers me when a precise word becomes less precise.
Language evolves by brute force. Remember, the dictionary dictates, but it also reflects. If enough people say something in a consistent way, it gets in. Here are some precise words whose loss (or imminent loss) irritates me:
Datum. The singular of data is almost gone. People use data as a singular noun now. They also have to use it as an adjective, because the effective elimination of datum has given rise to the monstrosities data set and data point. To paraphrase George Orwell: “One word good, two words bad!”
Criterion. The singular of criteria isn’t extinct, but it’s definitely endangered. “I want to use another criteria to make the decision.” Yeccch.
Alumnus, alumna, and alumnae. I’ve always found these words beautiful. Dig: An alumnus is a single male. An alumna is a single female. Alumnae describes a group of all females. Alumni describes a group of all males, or a group of both sexes. You are not “an alumni” of anything. If these words are going down for reasons of political correctness or whatever, I’d much rather just see graduate take their place, rather than their beauty perverted by using alumni for everything.
Semiweekly. Semiweekly means twice a week. Biweekly means every two weeks. Many people say biweekly when they mean twice a week. They also say biweekly when they mean every two weeks. How is this progress? Why are we throwing precision under the bus and embracing ambiguity?
Literally. I’ve fought like a tiger trying to save this word, but I think it’s lost. Today, lots of folks say literally when they mean figuratively. “She was so angry, smoke literally came out of her ears.” Is that so? So the strength of her anger was such that it caused something inside her ears to ignite? Wow, that is angry.
The worst part about losing what we perceive to be the true senses of words is that we generally lose them because we’re in the minority. So by the time we notice they’re slipping away, it’s practically certain they’ll stay gone (in our lifetimes, anyway).
It literally makes my head explode.
First image: Grace Episcopal Church in Anniston, Alabama, where Mrs. Jeanie Thagard enabled English to seduce me in the fourth grade at the Episcopal Day School. Thanks to the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama home page.
Second image: Morton Hall at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in Huntsville, Alabama, where Dr. David Neff fascinated me every time he spoke. Thanks to the UAH home page.
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One of my pet peeves is when people use the word unique to describe something that is not ONE OF A KIND.
Oooh, it’s a unique feeling, but your hands are cold. 🙂
Yeah, I don’t like that either. I don’t care for degrees of unique either, i.e. “that blouse is more unique than that one.”
I guess if I were pedantic enough about it I’d just call it a nonsense word, because everything is unique. While no known physical law prevents it, it is extremely unlikely that any two things in the universe are identical.
The King James Bible can be very beautiful but thank Gaia we don’t talk like that anymore. I wonder if in 400 years our language will seem as archaic to our descendents as Shakespearian English seems to us today.
Bob230
Bo, you are my hero. I was JUST thinking today about how annoying it is that people use “criteria” instead of the singular “criterion”. I also had to sit through a 40-minute presentation about “Post-modernism authors, post-modernism architects, and post-modernism people”. You mean, they were post-modernists???
Have never had the occasion to use alumnae.
One of my college professors would always correct students who would say “Print it Out” – he’d say “print in out? Are you deleting it?” You only need to say “Print it” Its already out when you print it. I have to bite my tongue not to correct my bosses when they say print it out…
You are my brother in arms, Bo! Manly embraces all around! I’ve been fighting so hard against simple cases of poor spelling and grammar that I’ve let people slip by with these. No more!
To give you an example of why I’ve been so distracted, there is a guy at work who keeps sending us support tickets in which he meticulously instructs us how to “recipircate [sic] the problem.” Uhhhhhmmmm… If you meant “reciprocate” as in, “I encountered a problem and am now turning around and causing one for you in kind,” then yes, you are indeed reciprocating the problem. But given the context, I’m pretty sure you mean replicate, dude.
Bob: After nosing through specs all day, Shakespeare sounds quite comfortable sometimes.
Lesley: Shucks. 🙂 Verbosity is the most common symptom of someone trying to “sound important,” and that sounds like what was happening there to me. It sometimes seems paradoxical, but it’s usually a lot harder to use fewer words than it is to use more. And we’re drowning in examples right now. “At this point in time.” Oh? You mean NOW? My favorite ever was in a software spec about ten years ago: “in a manner so as to.” You mean TO?
Brina: That’s probably a deconstruction of “printout,” where the “out” is short for “output,” not a locative preposition. It might bother me from an efficiency perspective (because “print it” works fine, as you said), but it doesn’t feel like a grater to me.
Jeremy: Aw, feel the love. 🙂 I actually don’t correct people much, though a couple of my colleagues run stuff by me pretty regularly. I sure have to bite my lip whenever someone says “let Bob or myself know.”
While I am far from perfect, and break rules on a regular basis, I at least try. It bugs people that I try to rewrite sentences that end in prepositions. That is “professional” me – blogging me, on the other had, is lazy, in a semi-unique way.
I usually bit my tongue, too. I’m sure you’ve also found that there is a fine line between appearing helpful and coming off like a pompous ass. This dude with his recipircate is too much to take though. I have to stop the madness!!!
My ULTIMATE language pet peeve (which at this point, I’m afraid, is a lost cause to fight) is when people say “he was hung” instead of “he was hanged”. I don’t know why it bothers me so much as “hanged” even sounds wrong…but it’s NOT!
I worked with a lady that used the word “pacific” when she meant “specific”. She loved the word and said it often. It drove me crazy. However, she was a wonderful software developer and a nice person. So, I tried not to flinch too much.
I’m sure my grammar drives Bo crazy. I know it’s gotten worse over the years. I blame part of that on all those test plans I’ve had to crank out. Succinct technical commands always won out over proper English. It hasn’t helped that these days most of my conversations are with a five year old and a two year old.
I had a coworker who said “supposebly,” as in, “Supposebly the lost city of Atlantis was found the other day, but I don’t believe it.”
He was such a nice guy that it was hard to get mad at him though.
Saintseester: I don’t find your writing lazy.
Lesley: Wow. Are you in some “street justice” borough of Minneapolis in which people are hanged right and left? 🙂
Lea: Your grammar is just fine. You have a few Indiana idiosyncrasies from your mom like “of an evening” and “grocery trading” (which always makes me envision you walking our best cow to the Publix to swap for our chicken fingers and Fruity Pebbles), but you use the language competently.
Jeremy: I can’t remember where I’ve heard that, but it sounded familiar immediately. So I’ve had Supposebly Guy in my life too.