Talk Pretty or Forever Hold Your Peace

December 28, 2006 05:33 PM EST

views: 146 | comments: 63

After much hesitant consideration and self-doubt, I've decided that I can no longer hold back this seepage of splenetic discharge that has threatened to fulminate catastrophically if ignored or suppressed any longer. I have been a devoted proponent of proper language usage for as long as I've been conscious of the rules governing speech and any other form of verbal expression, and it pains me inexpressibly to see even the most subtle of errors become so widely spread that they insinuate themselves into first the vernacular and then eventually, tragically into the accepted lexicon itself, where they replace a language's tradition. For years I have held my tongue, denying myself opportunity after opportunity to wield my semantic superiority like a rapier and correct people when they ludicrously and ignorantly corrupt the language with an abusage of words by inappropriate contextual application. By no means am I in any position to right even the most egregious wrongs when they arise in conversation. If anything, I'm even less qualified for this duty than most others, because English is not my first language, not my second, third, or even fourth, but rather my fifth. Nitpicking from a smug, anal-retentive foreign schmo is audacious to the point that exacting a violent physical revenge against me is not only condonable but expected and encouraged. What's more, the fear of making a grave error of my own has until now outweighed any urge, no matter how powerful, to restore order to the art of talk-talk-talking. What was that I just said about until now? Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. Now the time is nigh that I, the paladin of proper parlance, grow a spine and show y'all how it's done.

This list is only the tip of the iceberg, and a colossal iceberg it is. If everyone whose speech was riddled with errors suddenly decided to speak flawlessly or not at all, the world would be a silent place and about as exciting as celery and I would be happier than I ever have been (happier even than the time I fought Oscar de la Hoya in space to win a free private concert by David Bowie and Queen... also in space). But as I cannot impose an ultimatum like this without financial contributions from the seven richest kings of Eurasia, the best I can do for the time being is to draft a cursory list of a few glaring errors I frequently encounter in day-to-day conversation and writing. If there are nine things to avoid this summer, the first is a tag-team mugging by knife-toting Turkish street thugs. The second through the eighth are these linguistic gaffes.

decimate - The popular conception of decimation is one of complete destruction. And you know what my conception of this conception is? Complete idiocy. All you need is a working knowledge of Latin roots and you can infer the exact definition yourself. Move a decimal point around and you can perform all kinds of mathematical tricks involving tens and multiples thereof. The prefix deci-, it would seem, means ten. Decimate, then, means to destroy or kill the majority of a whole, in which the majority constitutes everything but one tenth. Unless you are a military strategist or an exterminator, the odds that you will need this word in its purest form are slim. But now you know.

irony, ironic - Of all the subcultures I've encountered, none are more guilty of mistreating irony and its many derivatives than the hipsters. Bear with me, dear readers, for a brief anecdote that takes us to the belly of the beast itself, in a Vancouver café crawling with these tight-jeaned, greasy-haired plague-mongers. I stood outside said café, wearing a t-shirt detailed with Hebrew lettering and something about an Israeli bomb squad. "I like your t-shirt", said one tight-jeaned, greasy-haired, hipster plague-monger. "It's so ironic." I ought to have left it be, but I couldn't. "Ironic?" I sneered at him. "How is this shirt ironic? Tell me how it's ironic. Please." He launched into some half-baked explanation about how I was obviously not an officer in any branch of any military, and just as obviously was not Israeli or even remotely Jewish for that matter. The contrast between the general sense of the t-shirt and the general sense of me gave the union of Me and Shirt a quality that, according to him, expressed irony. I schooled the kid with a show of mock indignation. How dare he accuse me of antisemitism by attributing irony to my wardrobe! How brainwashed has he been by post-WWII propaganda that he sees a fair-haired, blue-eyed guy in an Israeli t-shirt and finds it so incongruous as to be a premeditated attempt at caustic wit? Dear reader and café patron, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me that irony is "a state of affairs that appears perversely contrary to what one expects". Stick that in your clove cigarette and smoke it, hipster.

irregardless - Regardless of frequency of use, this is not a word. So please do not use it. Ever. When in doubt, simply say "in spite of..." or "anyway", but by no means are you authorised to say irregardless. This un-word is a hybrid of irrespective and regardless, and while the effort that went into its coinage is commendable, the result is nothing but condemnable. When we take the time to dissect this fallacious neologism and analyse its morphology, we find that it contains a triple-negative, and if it were a word, would actually mean the complete opposite of regardless. The prefix irr- cancels out the negative suffix -less, and by all means should render the whole hamstrung concept of irregardlessness null and void. But if we thought about anything, these problems would not exist to be remedied in the first place. Looks like we've got a vicious cycle, wouldn't you say?

lethal vs. fatal - My theory concerning the confusion between these words is that people cannot keep track of time. I don't know why they don't, maybe because horology is a form of deviltry, but nobody seems to pay chronological order or cause and effect any heed when discussing the threat and/or effect of something. If only the average plebe learned to keep these words and their meanings straight, we could all be spared the gratuitous redundancy of phrases like "potentially fatal", and the moot-point confloption of a "fatal diagnosis". Fatality is certain. A label of fatal can only be applied after it- whatever "it" in this case may be -has killed someone or something. Lethal, however, can best be described as the the potential to become fatal. Tuberculosis is lethal, but unless you've flushed your antibiotic stash or converted to the Church of Christian Science, it does not have to be fatal. (I, however, would like it to be if I should ever contract tuberculosis. Just think about it, the galloping consumption would be one hell of a way to go.) We can evade a lot of undeserved pessimism in our little world if we don't bandy about the word fatal as if death is a foregone conclusion in any situation that has a mere chance of going wrong.

momentarily - If my iPod freezes and I dial Apple's customer service line and the operator patches my call over to Bombay where an outsourced phone-jockey walks me through repair procedures step by step at twelve dollars a minute, I'll be moderately to severely nettled if I am told to wait for a representative to assist me momentarily. Expedience is not at all presupposed by the word momentary, but brevity is. If Deepak in Bombay will solve my iPod-related problems momentarily, the problem is either a simple one that requires little effort and thus little time, or a complicated one that cannot be permanently corrected, thus returning after a brief respite. If you wish to inform someone of an impending event, please just say soon. If you wish to inform someone of an impending event and sound smart doing it, say anything but momentarily.

nauseous - This malapropism has become such matter-of-course that I fear it's now vying for official approval as a synonym for queasy. Alas and alack, what we have on our hands is another pressing incident of a blurred boundary between cause and effect. Nauseous does not describe the state you're in after exposure to, let's say, wonky cheese or funny milk. Nauseous is not how you feel when your digestive tract questions the soundness of your judgement. Nauseous simply means sickening. A nauseous odour or flavour or sight or personality affects one with nausea, and one in turn feels nauseated, or "affected with nausea". There's a certain accidental justice that comes from the common misuse of this word. When someone says, "oh, I'm so nauseous" after a go-'round on a whirly ride or whatever, they have no idea how right they are, although in reality this nauseousness has nothing to do with a disruption of the equilibrium, and everything to do with havoc their asinine stupidity wreaks on my sense of semantic prudence.

peruse - By a significant margin, this is the most irritating faux-pas I've met in years. I found it used inappropriately on a fellow Epinions writer's profile yesterday, but in the interests of this person's dignity and of sparing myself whatever hassle would arise from my incriminating this particular user with the dropping of names, I will leave him/her anonymous. People use peruse when they want to sound a little more clever than they think they would if they simply said read or skim. Unfortunately, perusal is quite the opposite of skimming, as it involves a thorough examination of the material in question. Perhaps if those parties guilty of unacceptably using this word perused a dictionary or a thesaurus in the the word's truest sense rather than merely skim it, they wouldn't sound like such buffoons.

vicious circle - I will give perpetrators of this blunder the benefit of the doubt, and blame the origins of the phrase vicious circle on the Germans, in whose language Teufelskreis is a perfectly valid word. Teufelskreis, for those who do not know, means vicious cycle, and translates literally as devil's circle. I also understand that circles are sometimes implied in cycles, so the tenor of this figure of speech remains somewhat intact despite the error. We (or rather, the collective you I attach to the native Anglophones addressed here) must nevertheless remind ourselves that we are not Germans, no matter how hard we sometimes may try, and therefore cannot talk about a vicious circle when we mean vicious cycle and expect to slip by without ridicule.

***

Consider yourselves re-educated. That's all I can say in closing.

Tags: literacy vs illiteracy, grouch, finicky, technicalities, edication, complaints, vexation, random musings, particular, uptight, grump, grammar, stupidity, miseducation, peeves, correctness, speech, common mistakes, curmudgeon, life, mistakes, language, snob, errors, bitching, punctiliousness, reeducation, irritation, picky, people, stupidity of the masses