The death of language
He passed.
What did he pass? An exam? The ball? A slow-moving vehicle? The marmalade? An argument to a function? Wind?
Ice tears
I caught sight of a wonderfully poetic poster in Civic a few years ago.
Or so I thought.
Ice tears live apart.
Too cold even to flow together, are they the epitome of loneliness?
I went back to admire the words more slowly, only to discover I had misread an anti-drug poster.
It warned of the dangers of methamphetamine, Ice tears lives apart.
What a difference a letter makes!
Limiting imagination
Only someone with a very limited imagination could use the trite cliché
limited only by your imagination
.
Concrete abstraction
My computer refers to a restoration point as a restore point
and my hire car instructions refer to roadside assistance as roadside assist
.
Is this to make these things sound less abstract, more down-to earth?
Using abstract nouns to concrete things is even worse.
When the leaders of an organisation do something,
why claim that the leadership
did it?
Why refer to the members as the membership
?
Pretentiality
This week, on ABC Radio National,
a man claimed that his performance evoked a physicality in the audience
!
Pretentious and clumsy ality
words
are usually used to add a specious air of intellectual rigour to a statement
by making physical things appear abstract.
In this case I can find no meaning whatsoever in the man's statement.
Issues
It began in the 1990s as a mealy-mouthed avoidance of responsibility by computer maintenance men
who couldn’t solve their client’s problems.
Then it spread like a linguistic virus.
Now everyone calls problems issues
.
US writing
Last night, in a TV drama,
a character used the silly circumlocution as we speak
for now
.
The problem was that nobody would have done that in 1964,
the year in which the drama was set.
Mistakes in the language of a time or a place occur frequently in almost every historical drama.
It can be even worse in US historical fiction.
For example, the novel The beekeeper’s apprentice, which is set in England in 1914,
is littered with both anachronisms and non-English forms.
The author, Laurie King, clearly has no sensitivity to the language of that place or time.
On one page alone,
she has English characters using the US irregular past tense dove
and US meanings for automobile
and valise
.
She even has a woman police constable as one of her characters when none existed.
Verbal padding
This year’s crop of clumsy phrases are unusually stupid.
any time soon
instead of soon
and As of yet
instead of yet
are two that spring to mind.
I can see no reason to say as of
in any sentence:
it’s often ambiguous and always ugly.
As of next week
simply means from next Week
.
As of last Frinday
simply means since last Friday
.
As of now
probably means from now on
but it may simply mean now
.
Of no meaning
Where did that meaningless of
come from?
It used to be March 2012
.
Why March of 2012
?
Absolute relief
What a relief!
People have suddenly stopped saying absolutely
to indicate agreement
and reverted to the good old-fashioned indeed
.
I wonder how long it will last.
New Year’s what?
Why have people started saying New Years
when there’s only one of it?
I can understand New Year’s Eve
or New Year’s Day
,
because there it’s a possessive, but New Years
? Really?
This really annoys me too! I feel like walking around with a big apostrophe saying, You need this to be New Year’s Eve.
Alumni
Graduates
is a perfectly good English word.
In most cases it will do just as well as the Latin alumni
.
If you must use the foreign alternative,
the least you can do is to use the correct form.
You can’t have an alumni
—it’s either
an alumnus or an alumna,
and the plural is either alumni or alumnae.
A paradox in a trite phrase
Think outside the box
is such a trite and unimaginative saying,
I’ve never heard anyone say it who could do it.
Real estate
Is developer
the only one-word oxymoron?
Scrambled dates
Why have people reverted to writing dates in the ugly and illogical format December 9, 2014
?
Both the ABC
and the SBS
began doing it in the middle of 2012.
I suspect it’s because somebody’s too lazing
to correct the foreign default settings in a computer program.
The AusInfo Style Manual (ISBN 0-644-07263-6)
specifies 9 December 2014
(with no commas) as the correct format.
Exponential growth
It’s growing exponentially,
does not mean it’s growing quickly;
a growth rate of 1% per million years is exponential,
but I wouldn’t call it fast!
False personalisation
I was working on a colleague’s computer when it announced
Configuring Windows updates
Do not turn off your computer.
I think it meant this computer.
I was perfectly confident turning off my computer.
Displaced adjectives
Cheaper prices? No, I don’t want to buy any prices: I’d like the prices to be lower, so the goods are cheaper.
The weather can be warmer, but the temperatures can’t. I shall die, but my property won’t, so how can it be a deceased estate? My friend has a disability, so I hope the toilets they provide really aren’t disabled. And those male toilets and female toilets? Is someone trying to breed little baby toilets?
Exporting Strine
Isn’t it interesting how many Australian expressions
are adopted, unacknowledged, in England?
Last night, on a BBC TV program,
a Pom said Good on ya!
. (They used to say Good for you!
.)
I wonder how long they’ve been saying that.
Witch check
Ear of toad and eye of newt
or was that eye of toad and ear of newt
?
Tell the witch we have spell checkers for that. As for me, I need a spelling checker.
Location location
It’s quite all right for a film crew to say they’re on location
.
That usage is well established.
Elsewhere, location
is often pretentious and usually ambiguous.
Plain words are much better.
Location
can mean place
, site
, spot
, position
,
area
, whereabouts
, locality
or region
.
Locate
can mean put
, place
, site
, set
, look for
or find
.
You can simply say move
or even shift
instead of relocate
.
Worst of all, located
may have no meaning at all!
The clumsy sentence His office is located on the ground floor.
has exactly the same meaning as
the plain English sentence His office is on the ground floor.
Exaggerated emotion
I simply don’t believe some of the things people say in interviews.
I’m passionate about double-entry bookkeeping.
Come off it!
Mildly interested, perhaps, but passionate? Really?
And why doesn’t anybody show sympathy any more? Politicians and public speakers always claim to have empathy for the people they talk about. It’s either false or misguided. True empathy for profound distress would probably lead to paralysis or foolish extremes. Sympathy, on the other hand, would retain sufficient detachment to allow more thoughtful responses and more helpful actions.
Moving of
Fifty years ago, we would have said He walked out of the door and stood outside the house.
Now we’d say He walked out the door and stood outside of the house.
Isn’t it odd?
The of
is meaningless in both cases,
so why should it disappear from one place and appear in another?
Doing it yourself
Auto
means self
doesn’t it?
So autodidacts are people who teach themselves and
automobiles are a machines that move themselves.
Similarly with autoimmune, automatic, automaton, autonomous and so on.
Does that mean that auto-wreckers are people who wreck themselves?
Anachronism
The makers of films and TV dramas usually devote vast effort to ensure the historical accuracy of everything visual—costumes, furnishings, ornaments, tools, newspapers, street signs and, most particularly, cars. Why can’t they devote even a fraction of that effort to the historical accuracy of our ever-changing language?
Recently screened period dramas have had characters uttering
What’s not to like?
and No pressure then!
.
Both of these are very recent phrases
that are likely to become unfashionable as quickly as they came into fashion.
They certainly wouldn’t have been used 100 years ago.
Nor would anyone, even a teenager, have said whatever
or totally
to mean yes
.
I admit that Bertie Wooster did say absolutely
to mean yes
,
but even that was most unusual until a few years ago.
I’m thinking
I think to myself…
Well, who else are you going to think to?
Circumlocutions
There are changing fashions in mindless circumlocutions.
We used to hear the ugly phrase in any way, shape or form
.
Thankfully, it’s reverted to the straightforward in any way
.
The current crop contains nothing new or clever:
as we speak
for now
;
the first cab off the rank
for the first
;
on a weekly basis
for weekly
;
look and feel
for look
;
back in 2012
for 2012
(as if we didn’t know that 2012 was in the past!);
one year anniversary
for first anniversary
Recently I heard a reporter say that a surfer had been up close and personal
with a great white shark. Up close, perhaps,
but there’s nothing personal about a shark attack—you’re simply food.
Pudding proof
The proof isn’t in the pudding.
That wouldn’t make sense.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Verbed
We seem to have given renewed vigour to that old slogan
There ain’t a noun that can’t be verbed.
Sometimes the effects are amusing, sometimes silly.
Today we can’t write something, we have to author it;
we can’t give something to anybody, we have to gift it to them;
we can’t lend something to anybody, we have to loan it to them;
we can’t borrow something from anybody, we have to loan it from them.
Artspeak
When we sense ourselves to be in proximity to something serious and art related,
we reflexively reach for subordinate clauses.
The question is why.
How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?
Slashes
There’s very rarely a good reason to use a slash (/) in an English sentence.
Sometimes it’s mistakenly used instead of a a hyphen,
for example audio/visual
when it should be audio-visual
.
Usually a slash is ambiguous— it could mean either and
or or
.
Does home/office
mean home or office
, home and office
or home-office
?
It’s completely unclear.
Whatever
I think it was a Hong Kong novelist who first pointed out that, in teenspeak,
yes
is whatever
and no
is as if
,
but he failed to mention that he said
is now he was like
.
Not backwards
We don’t call a comma a right way up comma
just because English people call a quotation mark (‘) an inverted comma
.
We don’t have to call a slash (/) a forward slash
just because there’s a backslash (\).
Less important
You don’t have to tell me, I know it’s too late,
but I do regret the loss of the word fewer
from our language.
The phrase he made less important mistakes
just doesn’t convey the same meaning as
he made fewer important mistakes
.
Beg the question
Have you noticed how the phrase beg the question
has come back into fashion?
It seemed to fall into disuse for a decade or two.
The funny thing is that it’s come back with it’s meaning reversed!
Previously it meant evade the question
†;
now it’s used to mean invite the question
.
Indigenous
I really can’t tell you of a time when indigenous became current, but I personally have an objection to it, and so do many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people… This has just really crept up on us… like thieves in the night… our people are using it now as well… Call us Aboriginal.