MISUSED OR ABUSED WORDS AND PHRASES 17

In reading for the nth time (where ‘n’ is an exceedingly large number) the misuse of common phrases – one example is the expression “begs the question”, I decided to take arms against a sea of errors and by opposing, if not to end, at least to attempt to mitigate the misinterpretations (with apologies to both William Shakespeare and for the crime of mixing metaphors). How well I have succeeded I leave to the judgment of the reader.

The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial using the expression “begs the question”, where their meaning clearly was ‘raises’ or ‘implies’ the question. But no, that is not what it means. What it means is to assume as fact what is in dispute. It is the petitio principii of logicians. For example if one is arguing that the Bible is divinely inspired and uses statements in the Bible to support that argument, then one is begging the question. My correction, sent to the Dallas Morning News, was met with ….. The Sound of Silence. After all, who wants to have their shortcomings exposed? Certainly not I and demonstrably not the DMN.

The words sour grapes leave a sour taste in my mouth – not literally in a gustatory sense of course, but with the figurative ill-tasting sensation of misconstruing what it means. Inevitably this expression is used to mean someone who whines or complains when they do not receive or achieve something they feel they are entitled to.

The expression comes from one of Aesop’s fables where a fox sees some delicious appearing grapes which are out of his reach and try as he might he can not get them. In frustration and resignation he allows as how they are probably sour. The expression really means that the claimant, unable to achieve his objective, declares that the prize was not worth his time and effort.

Aftermath is commonly and erroneously used to simply mean the period following an event, usually a disaster such as a fire, hurricane, or tornado: “In the aftermath of the tornado, many people in the neighborhood are still homeless.” Television and newspaper reporters are especially guilty of misusing this word. ‘After’ means second and ‘math’ is a mowing or harvest. So an ‘aftermath’ is a second happening, usually a disaster, following and caused by the first event. The San Francisco fire was an aftermath as it was a disaster following and caused by the earthquake of 1906.

At one fell swoop means all at once, as everyone realizes. As pointed out by Bergen Evans, what is not as well understood is that the word “fell” in this phrase is derived not from the past tense of “fall”, but from the noun “felon.”

In Macbeth (Act IV, scene III) when news of the murder of his wife and children by Macbeth is brought to Macduff, he exclaims, “Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop?” A kite is a fierce but ignoble hawk or falcon that preys on small quarry and Macduff sees the tragedy in the metaphor of a hawk striking defenseless prey.
Kudos from the Greek word kydos means praise or renown. Interestingly and singularly there never seems to be one kudo. To paraphrase Mark Twain, one could start building a very expressive vocabulary just by leaving kudos out. Enough said.

Careen and career - these words are a bit tricky. One reads about vehicles careening around street corners, but seemingly never about careering cars. What is the difference? To careen comes from a Latin word for ‘keel’ and means to keel over, to cause a ship to lie on its side and by extension now means to lean, sway, or tip to one side. The verb to career comes from a Latin word meaning ‘chariot’ and means to move at full speed. Therefore the proper description of a moving object would depend upon whether it is speeding or tilting. Both could occur. British journalist, columnist, and author Honor Tracy (1913-1987) wrote about men careering from one bar to another, but it might not be long before they would be careening.

The expression “to tell you the truth…” is in its own way as objectionable as such annoying speech fillers as “you know?”, “ah”, and “okay?”

The listener gets the impression that the speaker is going to do the unexpected and tell the truth: “I usually lie, but I will make an exception this one time only and tell you the truth.” Quite apart from the decidedly questionable effectiveness of a politician, lawyer, or used car (sorry, pre-owned car) dealer telling anyone they are not going to be mendacious, it is somehow unseemly to have to say you are going to be truthful. Much better in my opinion to say you are going to be candid. Nobody should be under a moral or ethical obligation to always be candid – except when one’s word is given, and then there is a moral imperative to do so.

Matinee – now that is a contradictory word if there ever was one; and there certainly are such genre. Matinees of movies, plays, and other performances are usually given in the afternoon, yet the word is derived from French meaning morning. So what gives? It is tied into the equally strange word ‘noon.’ Noon comes from the Latin nona meaning nine (nove is Italian for nine). The day used to be computed from sunup, so noon, nine hours later, occurred around 3:00 P.M. Anything before that, when matinees were performed, was considered morning. At some point the start of day was shifted backwards in time to midnight (12:00 A.M.) and noon extended 12 hours later to midday (12:00P.M.), which left matinees generally being performed in the afternoon. When so explained, the mystery of matinee becomes, like the Egg of Columbus, as clear as the sun at mid-day (noon).

As long as we are on the subject of numbers let’s consider some of the names of the months. September is the 9th month, October the 10th, November the 11th, and December the 12th, yet the names come from Latin septem, octo, novem, and decem meaning seven, eight, nine, and ten, respectively. What happened? Simple really. In the old calendar the year began with March which makes more sense that starting in winter. Still, we are stuck with a January 1st yearly starting date.
Is there a word more universally misused, at least in the United States, than unique? Even many trained journalists, authors, and public speakers merrily go along using such modifiers as very, almost, quite, extremely, etc. with unique. There may come a time when it is entirely proper to use modifiers with unique as has happened when other words and constructions which once were considered wrong then are eventually accepted. If that happens, language and logic will both be losers. In the meantime if something is unique it is one- of-a-kind and therefore no modification allowed.

The word very is even more sinned against than the word unique. It is likely the most overused word in the American language. No matter how hard I try to emphasize the importance of not over using this word I can not over do it. Think back, if you can, to the time when you did not hear either a public or private speaker preface a descriptive adjective with the adverb very – very enthusiastic, very interesting, very exciting, very strange, very difficult, very committed, and on and on. It has progressed to such an extreme that very has practically become a compound word with those adjectives. And it is now necessary to double or triple the word very when added emphasis is intended. Clearly the ubiquitous use of very has become a habit with many people – and an exasperating habit at that.

Dallas Morning News assistant managing editor, writing coach emeritus, and now book author, Paula LaRocque believes that such intensifiers as very are overused in an attempt to get closer to the right meaning when the perfect word does not come to mind. It is a poor substitute for not coming up with the right word. Mark Twain expressed it thusly: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

Currently/presently are often used as synonyms, incorrectly as it turns out. This mistake appears to be an especial bane of television weathermen. They will often say the temperature is presently X degrees even when the graphic on the screen is written ‘currently.’ Perhaps, in addition to other problems, they can not read.

Currently means right at this moment; presently means in a little while, shortly. What could be simpler and more straightforward?

My answer to the exclamatory “My, how time flies!” is to quote Austin Dobson’s The Paradox of Time: “Time goes you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go.”

Profane/obscene are another pair of words which cause a hell of a lot of confusion to some people, but shouldn’t. Obscene means offensive to accepted standards of modesty or decency. Profane is derived from ‘fane’ (Latin fanum) which is a temple and therefore profane refers irreverently to sacred things that belong in the temple and hence by extension limited to insults or irreverent words or actions directed against God.

Breathes there a person with curiosity so dead that he has not to himself hath said: “What is this strange dichotomy between the orthography and pronunciation of colonel?” It is an olla-podrida (Spanish: rotten pot) of confusion. The spelling of colonel is derived from the Italian colonnello, an officer who led a small column (Latin collonna) of soldiers.

We are half way there. The pronunciation is due to something called dissimilation in Spanish of the word into coronel (Spanish for colonel). Dissimilation is the process by which a speech sound becomes different from or less like a neighboring sound. For example the word purple (pur’ pal) devolved from the Old English word purpure (poor’ poo re) to keep from repeating the same sound. Actually it is not so much that we dislike repeating the same sound – we enjoy repeating vowels (“choo-choo”, “hopscotch”, “slam-bang”), but we do not like to enunciate consonants and then immediately do it again. Call it laziness or efficiency; this is what we seem hard-wired to do.

If the story about colonel seemed complicated then the following story about playing cards seems as complicated as the description of Russia by Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast in 1939: “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

The suits of a standard deck of playing cards are: clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. While it is true that diamonds and hearts match their symbols, spades only slightly resemble their symbol and clubs do not even remotely look like a club. What is going on? It is another of those wonderful mysteries (and riddles and enigmas) of language following a circuitous route.

In early Spain the four suits of their playing cards were espados (swords), bastos (clubs), dineros (pieces of money), and copas (chalices).

In France their four suits were pique (a soldier’s pike), trefle (trefoil), carreaux (diamond shape), and coeur (heart).

What has happened is that we have used all of the French symbols and translated two of their names (hearts & diamonds) and inexplicably used two of the translated Spanish names (spades & clubs) applied to French symbols.

Why on earth would we have done that? It is a riddle why we would have chosen the symbols from a deck of French playing cards in the first place; a mystery why we would use only two of their symbol names; and an enigma why we would apply two Spanish names for French symbols. It is a singular lesson in never making the mistake of confusing logic with language or necessarily with any other human activity.

Curmudgeon is not a word which is often misused – it is not used much at all in fact. Nonetheless, its coinage is beyond interesting; it is downright fascinating. Dr. Samuel Johnson decided to write his dictionary of the English language because he thought the language was being ‘corrupted’ (after delving deeply into the subject and being astute and intellectually honest, he rejected his original conviction and came to the conclusion that language is a living, breathing, evolving entity).

As related by Bergen Evans, while Johnson was compiling material for his dictionary he received a letter suggesting that the word curmudgeon was derived from the French coeur (heart) and méchant (evil). Either the letter was unsigned or he lost it and forgot who wrote it. The suggestion, though unsupported, was plausible and in his dictionary (1755) Johnson set it down for what it was worth: “a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur méchant, Fr. an unknown correspondent.” In his New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775), Dr John Ash, cribbing from Johnson, but, unfortunately for him, knowing no French, entered it as “from the French coeur unknown, méchant correspondent.” This is one of history’s most amusing and notorious instances of plagiarism. The antics of authors Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin were drab and colorless by comparison.

The word guys has become androgynously unisex. Boys and girls, men and women – young and old and in between - are now all referred to as guys. Anything wrong with that? Well, that does not mean a modern day Gibbon will chronicle a societal decline and fall in imitation of the old Roman Empire because of it, but perhaps there are some distinctions and differences that are worth preserving. It would be disconcerting, at least to me, to see female Olympic gymnasts straining on the rings and males pirouetting on the balance beam. Guys hieing down the street touting Prada handbags would also be incongruous.

I would even go so far as to punish anyone who refers to girls as guys by making them read the 1932 Damon Runyon novel, Guys and Dolls, and watch the movie of the same name once for each offence. My guess is that this would be similar to being placed on the rack – at first the sensation is not unpleasant, but in short order it becomes excruciatingly painful. On the other hand the fault, as with Cassius’ admonition to Brutus, may not lie in the stars or with society, but with me. Just call me an old curmudgeon.

Are data and none singular or plural words? Does water run uphill? Yes, sometimes. The word data is now widely used as either a singular or plural noun. One caveat is that its use should be consistent. It should be many data, data are, themselves, have; or much data, data is, itself, has. No less a figure than William F. Buckley would rather embrace socialism as a political philosophy than do anything other than use data as plural and datum as its corresponding singular. He is not a bad literary apotheosis to emulate.

Although none means no one; not one, which implies it is a singular word, contrarily however, since it is usually used with plural nouns (None of the passengers……), this would make it more natural to treat it as a plural word. But take your pick – your choice would be unimpeachable.

The word myriad can be used as a noun or an adjective, however there is a difference in meaning whether it is used an a noun or adjective. As a noun it means exactly 10,000 and as an adjective it means many, but an unspecified number. Careful writers follow this distinction - careless writers do not.

What could be more sacrosanct or inviolable than the imperative that a singular subject requires a singular verb and likewise a plural subject a plural verb? What indeed? Consider the following sentence: “More than one woman has changed her mind.” Because the subject ‘More than one’ is by definition plural the statement should be “More than one woman have changed their minds.” if the plural subject – plural verb requirement is followed. Yet anyone with an ear attuned to English knows that the second construction is grating and seems unnatural and forced.

How bad and how prevalent is the use of mixed metaphors? If I said their use is as non-euphonious to the ear as bamboo sticks pushed under one’s fingernails I would plead guilty to using one. But I won’t say it (denying you are going to say something even as you have just said it is called paralipsis).

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one object or idea is compared or identified with another in order to suggest a similarity between the two. A mixed metaphor is where two or more metaphors are combined in an illogical or incongruous manner. “He was a thorn in my side, but now he has bitten the
dust.” or “The president will put the ship of state on its feet as he rolls up his sleeves.” Even Shakespeare was guilty when in Hamlet he wrote: “to take arms against a sea of troubles….” Leave the mixing to drinks or concrete – you could get light headed as you try to extricate yourself from the linguistic morass of mixed metaphors.

Whether to use the adjectives less or fewer, that is the question; and a simple question with a simple answer it is. If the noun is singular then use less; if it is a plural noun use fewer. Why then do so many even educated people use less when the correct word is fewer (“There are ten less people who…” or “The risk factors have been reduced by less than a dozen.”)? The converse of mistakenly using fewer instead of less is seldom made. The answer to this question seems to be what lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson said when asked by a patron why he defined pastern as the knee of a horse in his dictionary: “Ignorance madam, pure ignorance.”

How important is the proper use of language? Not important if we do not care whether we communicate well with style, grace, and flair but, (not very, very, very……important) overridingly important if we want to speak and write eloquently with clarity and purpose.

No one should get the idea that speaking and writing well comes without exertion. As with anything worthwhile it takes deliberate effort and labor. In An Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope wrote: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”