Post your linguistic pet peeves here.
I'll start with with the improper use of the third person plural personal pronoun "they" when the singular form is called for.
(See below for the correct pronoun to use in this case.)
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Y'r welcome!
I shouldn't have invoked Howard Cosell here. To be fair: when Howard wanted to say that something happened, he'd say that it eventuated.
WORD CRIMES by "Weird Al" Yankovic.
I wish I would have titled this thread "Word Crimes." Oh, well... I'm not going to change it now.
This next story is not mine, it Tracy's. Tracy's position is Branch Office Administrator (BOA) of a financial firm. Recently the BOAs got some new internal communications software complete with a spellchack function. At the most recent BOA regional meeting, one of the BOAs asked how to disable the spellcheck function. First of all, if the BOA is not making any errors, she will never see the corrections. Second, if she is making errors, why would she want to turn the function off and send the message out incorrect? This is from a BOA who routinely spells the plural of "bonus" bonus's, and the contraction of "I am" Im.
Along those same lines (and this is my story), shortly after Tracy and I bought our house, my mom gave us a hand-painted sign for the front yard which reads "The Plackemeier's" instead of "The Plackemeiers'." (I would have even accepted "The Plackemeiers.") I my mom knew we would never use it because she apologized for the misplaced apostrophe when she gave it to us. (To my mom's credit, she supplied the person who made it only with the spelling of our name, not the punctuation.)
Something that's become commonplace on cable news gets my goat.
Saying "The president, he said he is going to Europe" instead of "The president said he is going to Europe." "Taylor Swfit, she is giving a concert tonight" instead of "Taylor Swift is giving a concert tonight."
I assume the insertion of the pronoun is to sound more erudite? I don't even know if there's a grammatical rule against it. But I was taught in grade school to avoid that construction, and common sense says it's redundant. It makes my ears hurt.
Isn't the first rule of writing "Omit needless words"? 'Cuz that feels like some needless words right there.
I wonder -- do these generally happen at the top of the story? If so, it might be a way that the newscasters are signalling to their auidence what the story's about for whatever reason, and might be more accurately punctuated as "The president. He said he is going to Europe" and "Taylor Swfit. She is giving a concert tonight." I don't know why broadcasters would require that pause -- and hell, they might just be reading the teleprompter slowly -- but that might be what's happening.
Career/careen and forté/forte.
Thank you for these entries, Jeff. And I appreciate that someone other than myself knows them and their respective differences.
During the six years I was a cop, I did my share of accident reports. If I had a situation in which one of the drivers lost control of his [note: not "their"] vehicle and his car drove headlong into something, I would enter it into the remarks as "Driver № 1's vehicle careered into the retaining wall of the PVA."
In such cases, if it was a new supervisor approving my reports, I would inevitably get the report back with a paper-clipped note reading something along the lines of "You need to correct the typo in 'careened'." And I would seek out the supervisor and inform him that it wasn't a typo. That conversation, with stray minor differences, went like this every time:
"That isn't a typo. 'Careered' is right. It means to hurl headlong."
"That's 'careen'."
"No. 'Careen' means to proceed in a forward direction, but weaving from side to side in a serpentine fashion. 'Career' means to hurl forward, like the driver's car did into the retaining wall."
(At this point, the supervisor would reach for the dictionary on his desk and turn to the section with words beginning with 'caree---'. He'd read, and then his eyes would narrow. Finally, he would speak.)
"You're right. I didn't know that."
Now, for one of my linguistic peeves. We've all heard someone do this in speech (italics mine):
"If we have separation of church and state, why does all of our money have quote unquote In God We Trust printed on it?"
That "quote-unquote" thing drives me crazy. Aye, speaking the words "quote" and "unquote" are the spoken-word representations of quotation marks used in writing. But like quotation marks, the words are supposed to bracket the quoted material.
It's quote In God We Trust unquote---not quote unquote In God We Trust.
Some folks who do it right, usually television commentators, will use "close quote", vice "unquote". I suspect that the hick-sounding "quote unquote" has forced a lack of respectability for the word unquote.
At this point, the supervisor would reach for the dictionary...
Unfortunately, that tactic may no longer work. As you yourself pointed out, "I'm afraid modern dictionaries are a poor reference."
Unfortunately, that tactic may no longer work. As you yourself pointed out, "I'm afraid modern dictionaries are a poor reference."
Oh, to be sure, most modern dictionaries include some description of "to hurl foward headlong" under their respective definitions of careen---on the strength of "that's what everybody believes it means".
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