Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

Lynn has a post about a few linguistic pet-peeves and such.

I have to admit that I commit the error she rails upon at the very end: When I refer to the body of work Mozart wrote in the concerto form, I say "concertos" (as opposed to "concerti"). I offer no defense other than (a) this is the way I've always said it; (b) I've seen "concertos" used by such music writers as David Dubal and Harold Schonberg; (c) well, that's my entire defense. I hope Lynn doesn't sic the linguo-police on me!

The musical term whose constant misuse does bug me is "crescendo". "Crescendo" is a verb, and it describes the act of growing in volume, as in: "At the end of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the orchestra crescendoes to double-forte." However, this word is often used -- incorrectly -- as a noun, denoting the pinnacle reached: "At the end of the first movement of the Ninth, the orchestra reaches a crescendo." Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Lynn also points to this list of annoying errors in English, when words are either pronounced quite wrongly or used in place of the correct, similar-sounding word or homynym. A lot of these errors annoy me when I hear them (although I confess to not being overly scandalized by the "nucular" pronunciation of "nuclear"). One that I didn't see on this list is "axe" instead of "ask", as in, "Let me axe you a question." Ugh!

Now, I've noticed in my writing that it's easy, when I'm typing and my fingers start whipping out ahead of my brain, that I can make some of the common errors myself, and I'm always shocked to see them when I edit my manuscripts. While doing my recent edit of The Welcomer, I came across a couple of instances of "your" when I meant to use "you're" (but thankfully, never when I meant "yore"). I also tend to type "to" when I mean "too"; this I simply chalk up to not striking the second "o" hard enough to register, and thus it is not so much an error as a physical mishap. My most common error in typing, though, is really annoying given that I'm writing a fantasy that involves a lot of equestrian-based travel: When I refer to "reins", I invariably type "reigns" instead. I lost count of how many times I had to correct that error in the manuscript in the last few months. As Professor Higgins might say, "The reign in Speign falls meignly on the pleign." (You may groan now.)

Split infinitives don't offend me, but I'm coming to loathe adverbs -- thanks, Mr. King -- so I'm conflicted on that score. Ending sentences with prepositions, though, annoys me to no end. Sometimes it can't be avoided without sounding even worse, though: witness Churchill's famous statement, "This is the kind of English up with which I will not put." This tradeoff strikes me as perfectly fair: languages are human creations, and nothing we ever create is perfect because we aren't.

Finally, I have to admit that I'm less of a stickler for specific definitions of words than a lot of people I know. Someone (I think it was Neil Gaiman, but I'm not sure) once wrote: "I can accept that language evolves and words change meaning, but as a writer, when a word that had a specific meaning loses that meaning, I lose a tool." I sympathize, but only to a point. As far as I am concerned, "decimate" no longer means "to destroy one tenth of"; likewise, "impact" as a verb can mean for one object to forceably strike another. (The OED backs me up on that last point, actually.) I don't like slovenly English, but I don't think it should be on an ivory pedestal, either -- eternal and unchanging. Metaphorically, I like to think of language as a well-tended garden: not static, but also not overridden with ugly weeds and outgrowths beyond the boundaries and tangles.

(OK, one more note: no subset of English angers me more than the Godawful crap you see in the business world, where horrific phrases like "maximize our profit outcomes" and other wondrous feats of nebulous verbosity, often consisting of pages-upon-pages of nauseating passive-voice crap are flung about like manna from Heaven. And what really scares me is the business-types who not only write like that, but talk like that. The purpose of language is to communicate, not to make business people sound important.)