Language drift

It's surely a sign of age to be increasingly irritable about changes in grammar and usage. Does anyone else notice that published pieces increasingly find it difficult to use phrases like "much less" and "no less" and "if worse comes to worst" and "sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander" properly? It's as if the authors had all suffered strokes. "Much less" quite often has the two elements reversed, so instead of "I was so tired I could barely walk, much less (or let alone) run" it comes out "scarcely run, much less walk," which makes no sense. "No less" should mean "fully as great as," as in "my presentation received rave reviews from the national expert on my topic, no less." It has nothing to do with the "much less" idiom, but gets wound in somehow. The worse/worst expression appears in reverse or in doubles of worse/worse or worst/worst. The "sauce" idiom, especially in speech, tends to sound like "sauce for the . . . [pause]" followed by lame muttering of something indecipherable.

I realize this is part of the natural progression of language. An idioms that is too hard to recall either falls out of use or is replaced with something that sounds familiar, even if it no longer has the sense of the original. Another take, however, is that there's no such thing as an editor any more, not even in formal book publishing, let alone online sites. (See, it's not that difficult.)

Don't get me started on rein/reign, regime/regimen, principal/principle, or affect/effect. These young whippersnappers. If the shoe fits, you must acquit.

8 comments:

  1. I noticed that "much less" thing just the other day, myself.

    You might be right about the lack of editors; but my money is on the dwindling belief in, and importance of, objective reality.

    If facts can be whatever suit one's political preferences (and if gender is determined by whim rather than genome) then, pray tell, what hold can mere grammatical convention possibly have on one's lyrical urges?

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  2. I agree with your beef, Tex, wholeheartedly, but those errors stem from ignorance and laziness. My beef is with the deliberate distortion of our language and attempts to insert Newspeak into it. Things like "migrants" for "illegal aliens," "fair share," as though that's definitive without definition.

    Eric Hines

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  3. I mean maybe it's a sign of age. I was pretty emphatic about all that stuff when I was younger; as I get older I find that I don't care nearly as much. Everything is cheaper than it used to be, partly because we've cut out a lot of the human labor involved. There aren't editors, which practically means that there aren't teachers whose job it is to identify and correct the errors.

    On the other hand, it all costs less. Lewis Grizzard used to joke about people complaining that the Atlanta Journal wasn't accurate. He responded, "Hey, it don't cost but a quarter." Journalism is free now, and worth every penny.

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  4. Anonymous6:23 PM

    One of our local news programs is infamous among English teachers for the misuse of words by the reporters and anchors. They are all in their 20s-30, and seem completely unaware of the irritation they cause. And why has "gifted" replaced "gave?" If the concern is space (newsprint inches), "gave" remains shorter.

    The past perfect tense seems to be dying out entirely as a verb form, now that I think about it.

    LittleRed1

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  5. And there are sports personalities doing the color commentary in real time on a game (and newspaper personalities writing about yesterday's game) using the present tense to describe an action already completed.

    They're not oblivious to their bad grammar; they just think they're being cool.

    Eric Hines

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  6. raven2:12 AM

    Martial and Marshall and marshal seem to be favorites to misuse.

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  7. There's a class of popular history recorded lectures that have the strangest tendency to switch among past, present, and future tenses to narrate the sequence of events in a single episode. That's in addition to the colloquial habit of switching past and perfect, as in "I seen her" and "I had saw her," which I hear a lot but don't often see written.

    I always have to check the number of L's in the law enforcement officer and the verb meaning to gather. I need a Nash ditty: A one-L marshal, that's a verb, a two-L Marshall, that's a cop--only it should rhyme. You can bet your finest drawerful, you'll never see a 3-L martial.

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