Friday, July 19, 2019
If you're going to defend.....
I probably shouldn't waste effort on these idiots but can't resist. TAC quotes a passage from someone named Lionel Shriver who is defending the grammarrhoid tendency.
“I’ve thrown in my lot with the pedants. Yes, language is a living tree, eternally sprouting new shoots as other branches wither . . . blah, blah, blah. But a poorly cultivated plant can readily gnarl from lush foliage to unsightly sticks. The internet has turbocharged lexical fads (such as ‘turbocharge’) and grammatical decay. Rather than infuse English with a new vitality, this degeneration spreads the blight of sheer ignorance. So this month we address a set of developments in the prevailing conventions of the English language whose only commonality is that they drive me crazy. “I long ago developed the habit of mentally correcting other people’s grammatical errors, and sometimes these chiding reproofs escape my lips (‘You mean “Ask us Democrats”’). Marking up casual conversation with a red pencil doesn’t make me popular, and I should learn to control myself. Yet fellow philological conservatives will recognize the impulse to immediately regroove one’s neural pathways, the better to preserve one’s fragile ear for proper English. That ear is constantly under assault by widespread misusage that threatens by repetition to be—another on-trend verb—‘normalized.’If you're against all neologisms, you shouldn't use neologisms. Especially unnecessary ones. 1. Gnarl, which you didn't complain about, shouldn't be used as an intransitive verb. Gnarled is just an adjective. 2. Turbocharged, which you did complain about, isn't a neologism. It's a precise technical term used appropriately as a metaphor. 3. Regroove, which you didn't complain about, is a precise technical term used appropriately as a metaphor. Why is it better than the other two? 4. Misusage, which you didn't complain about, is a misuse. Usage is a word, misuse is a word, misusage is not a word. 5. On-trend, which you didn't complain about, is an unnecessary and unfamiliar neologism. Why not trendy? 6. Normalized, which you did complain about, is a precise technical term used appropriately as a metaphor.
Labels: defensible cases, Language update
¶ 4:56 PM
