Word Watch, Part One
© Adam Granger
Note: Miss Malaprop and Miss Abuse, an essay in the Park Bugle section, was drawn from this piece, and from Word Watch, Part Two.
As the son of an English professor and a children's book author and the brother of a playwright, I was bred to mind my p's and q's (a phrase which has several rival geneses, the most popular of which are a typesetter's admonition and a pub caution—as in pints and quarts).
For the first forty years of my life, I grumpily and no doubt pompously corrected any and all malapropisms, mispronunciations, misuses of phrase and errors of grammar, punctuation and syntax that came my way. I got tired of that, however, and decided to take a lighter stand on these issues.
Thus did I trade in my prescriptive grammarian's hat for that of a descriptive grammarian. Instead of clucking my tongue and shaking my head, I started noting with curiosity and, occasionally, amusement the—let's call them modifications—I read and heard in daily life.
This has been difficult at times, because nearly all such evolution is based on ignorance or, in the case of the spoken word, laziness, but, like, whaddaya gonna do, ya know? It's a lot more fun to note cheerfully the evolution of our communication practices than to be a stinkpot about it.
And besides, I can't get on too high a horse about all of this because I make my share of goofs and, beyond that, I commonly deliberately take liberties in my writing: I use fragments (although sparingly); I use commas on a case-by-case basis (judging their optimal use in any given sentence as opposed to following hard and fast rules regarding dependent clauses and such); and I put punctuation either inside or outside of quotes or parentheses depending on the context of the punctuation (here's an example where, the Chicago Style Manual notwithstanding, I think the period works better outside the parenthesis).
Oh, and I will go to my grave putting two spaces between dependent clauses, meaning after periods, exclamation points, question marks, colons and semicolons. I have never been given a good reason for this practice having been stopped. As one reads, one can see the larger gap looming and one gets a better sense of the structure of the sentence.
I break a lot of rules, but I do so with my eyes open. For example, in the numbered points below, I have no end-of-phrase punctuation. These points are mostly not sentences, and I chose not to treat them as such.
Word Watch entries, then, are intended as curiosities and good fun, not as excuses for incantation of elitist dogma.
I break language “errata” down into these seven categories:
I'll focus on numbers four and seven, since they're my favorites: Words misused and phrases whose comprehensibility is based on archaic words which sometimes, through a perfect storm of ignorance and happy coincidence, morph into 21st century phrases. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
The phrase “champing at the bit” has become “chomping at the bit”. The verb champ means to make biting or gnashing movements, but no one knows this anymore, and thus “chomping at the bit” becomes a more useful phrase (assuming that communication is the goal here).
A “bald-faced lie” has become a “bold-faced lie”. No one uses the term bald-faced anymore, but anyone with a computer (and that's pretty much everyone) know what bold-face is, and they understand that bold-face type has emphatic intent.
A “moot point” has become a “mute point” (I envision two people who can't agree facing each other and, having talked themselves into a stalemate, simply silently shrugging in an agree-to-disagree gesture).
We now “hone in on” something more often than we “home in on” it.
People say “in regards to” when they mean “in regard to”.
People listen to a sermon in church delivered by a pasture, not a pastor. This is probably a mechanical issue: it's easier for the mouth to make a U sound after a T than an O sound.
And finally, the phrase “I couldn't care less” has become “I could care less”. The phrase originally meant, “I care so little about this that I couldn't care any less than I do”. This change actually started fifty years ago and doesn't exactly fit the category, but I could care less. . .
For the first forty years of my life, I grumpily and no doubt pompously corrected any and all malapropisms, mispronunciations, misuses of phrase and errors of grammar, punctuation and syntax that came my way. I got tired of that, however, and decided to take a lighter stand on these issues.
Thus did I trade in my prescriptive grammarian's hat for that of a descriptive grammarian. Instead of clucking my tongue and shaking my head, I started noting with curiosity and, occasionally, amusement the—let's call them modifications—I read and heard in daily life.
This has been difficult at times, because nearly all such evolution is based on ignorance or, in the case of the spoken word, laziness, but, like, whaddaya gonna do, ya know? It's a lot more fun to note cheerfully the evolution of our communication practices than to be a stinkpot about it.
And besides, I can't get on too high a horse about all of this because I make my share of goofs and, beyond that, I commonly deliberately take liberties in my writing: I use fragments (although sparingly); I use commas on a case-by-case basis (judging their optimal use in any given sentence as opposed to following hard and fast rules regarding dependent clauses and such); and I put punctuation either inside or outside of quotes or parentheses depending on the context of the punctuation (here's an example where, the Chicago Style Manual notwithstanding, I think the period works better outside the parenthesis).
Oh, and I will go to my grave putting two spaces between dependent clauses, meaning after periods, exclamation points, question marks, colons and semicolons. I have never been given a good reason for this practice having been stopped. As one reads, one can see the larger gap looming and one gets a better sense of the structure of the sentence.
I break a lot of rules, but I do so with my eyes open. For example, in the numbered points below, I have no end-of-phrase punctuation. These points are mostly not sentences, and I chose not to treat them as such.
Word Watch entries, then, are intended as curiosities and good fun, not as excuses for incantation of elitist dogma.
I break language “errata” down into these seven categories:
- The misspelling of words
- The mispronunciation of words: saying Artic instead of Arctic (a result of oral laziness); not pronouncing the first L in salmonella (a result of ignorance)
- The misuse of punctuation and apostrophes: signs that read “Joe's Sport's Bar”; the ubiquitous it's instead of its. In these cases, people don't know whether to add an apostrophe or not, so they do, just to be sure.
- The simple misuse of words: using phenomena and criteria as singular forms instead of phenomenon and criterion; confusing a podium, upon which one stands, with a lectern, at which one stands (Interestingly, and true to descriptive tradition, my new Webster's Collegiate Dictionary acknowledges and embraces all three of these evolutions)
- Bad grammar: Me and my wife decided I should do this column because these rash of errors have got to stop!
- Use of the wrong homophone: To for too; there for their. These have exploded since people started relying solely on the computer spellchecker as their editor
- The evolution of idiomatic phrases and expressions
I'll focus on numbers four and seven, since they're my favorites: Words misused and phrases whose comprehensibility is based on archaic words which sometimes, through a perfect storm of ignorance and happy coincidence, morph into 21st century phrases. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
The phrase “champing at the bit” has become “chomping at the bit”. The verb champ means to make biting or gnashing movements, but no one knows this anymore, and thus “chomping at the bit” becomes a more useful phrase (assuming that communication is the goal here).
A “bald-faced lie” has become a “bold-faced lie”. No one uses the term bald-faced anymore, but anyone with a computer (and that's pretty much everyone) know what bold-face is, and they understand that bold-face type has emphatic intent.
A “moot point” has become a “mute point” (I envision two people who can't agree facing each other and, having talked themselves into a stalemate, simply silently shrugging in an agree-to-disagree gesture).
We now “hone in on” something more often than we “home in on” it.
People say “in regards to” when they mean “in regard to”.
People listen to a sermon in church delivered by a pasture, not a pastor. This is probably a mechanical issue: it's easier for the mouth to make a U sound after a T than an O sound.
And finally, the phrase “I couldn't care less” has become “I could care less”. The phrase originally meant, “I care so little about this that I couldn't care any less than I do”. This change actually started fifty years ago and doesn't exactly fit the category, but I could care less. . .
