I would never have heard of Lake Superior State University were it not for their annual list of objectionably worn out words or Cliché tropes that need to die -- right now. I have to admit that their track record of publishing this somewhat facetious list has impactified their reputation in an awesome way; enough so that I go looking for it every year.
Of course my lifelong effort to avoid pop culture makes some of these things new to me although they may be sufficiently old to you and malodorous enough to the list makers at LSSU to warrant the Big Ban. I do agree with most of their choices of course. Guru for instance has not only gone gangrenous and flyblown and worse, it's also a bit insulting to actual gurus, but YOLO, you only live once, was a total surprise to me, and hearing it once was more than enough. YODO, to you dude -- You Only Die Once and if I had my way it would be slow and painful.
Trending was a bit of a surprise until I read that it's being used in a novel way by journalists: those irrepressible word creators -- used not in the sense that a trend line in a graph of literacy rates, for example, is trending downward, ( and I think it is) but in the odd sense that something trending is being more frequently noticed and talked about by those same journo-babblers. Becoming trendy, as it were.
Trend that one right into the trash, please. The same dank dumpster that efforting as a pretentious journo-twit replacement for 'trying' was tossed into a few years back. Yes, I agree with the UP gurus (damn) that bucket list should kick its own bucket and those Randites using job creators to describe wealthy people should be stuffed into that bucket before kicking it under the bus. I also agree that it's time to push fiscal cliff over the fecal cliff, ( along with the hack it rode in on) but all in all, the annual list includes only 12 entries and is really meant to amuse.
"There's a slightly serious side to this, but mostly we're trying to have fun with it."said university PR director Tom Pink, but I'm a bit more serious than that. I mean I'd like to carry a Cricket bat with IMPACT written on it so as to create a serious impact with people who can't get through 12 words without uttering some maggoty metaphorical use of that word. No, I don't want to kick ass because that's another item on my own personal enemies list. It's a long list too, including anything one is likely to say in a Starbucks to persuade them to condescend to charge you 8 bucks for a cup of coffee.
Venti you see, isn't going to die of its own accord, nor even barista. Certain words need to be whacked, a still viable term, and anyone venturing to order an Americano from Flo at a Georgia Waffle House or any Dunkin' Donuts in America runs the risk of blunt instrument impact trauma if not an occasion to sleep with the fishes. (Oops, that's on the list too) Somebody has to enforce these things and if you don't watch yourself, if you jump the shark, drink the kool-aid, then welcome to the Cliché Cafe, where the obnoxious neologisms check in but they don't check out (dammit! that's also on the list) But you know what I mean. Some things are just too important to leave to nature and entropy. When some comet wipes us out 100,000 years from now, some idiot is going to say AWSOME! if we don't stop Cliché Cancer in its tracks, nip it in the bud. (Oh hell. . .)
So it may feel all trendy to talk about alternative medicine and natural medicine, but it doesn't dignify superstition and irresponsible marketing thereof. Words like that: words like pre-owned and mobile estates are used as industrial lubricants, coined to avoid having to call things snake oil or used car lots or trailer parks -- to charge more for a damned coffee, for instance. That's what I'm talkin' about (ouch) Don't go there, don't buy that and for Pete's sake if you do haff to go there, don't tell us you bought the T-shirt. Keep your dignity in-tact.
What? OK, ok, it's hard to avoid all these solecisms. True, if you use death nail for death knell, mute point for moot point; if you haff to do something irregardless of the consequences, you're beyond help -- and you're in danger. Either shut up or look carefully for that man with the bat. He's looking for you. If you hear or read something that's just so cute you haff to work it into the very next thing you say, it's time to be mute even if your points aren't. Somebody else has long since worn it out. Git 'er done and not so much aren't funny any more and portmanteau balbations like ginormous are a bit like fish and visiting relatives. 3 days and they begin to smell bad. Be advised.
And that's my real point. Maybe a sense of smell has more to do with good English than a bunch of rules and lists. Maybe we need to develop a track record of waking up and smelling the coffee Maybe striving to be hip is self defeating. Maybe. Maybe it's better to say it hurts than negatively impacts on. A big wooden bat upside your head hurts too. Make your choice. Avoid Clichés like the plague.
I avoid clichés like a plague of chickens running around with their heads cut off right before they get thrown under the bus. The best one I've ever heard was a mixed cliché-metaphor: "The road map to peace is dead in the water." I distinctly recall that it was spoken by some diplomat type on the Charlie Rose show. So copyright, TM and all linguistic shame reserved to that otherwise august personage, whoever he is.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the inanities one reads today in print and sur l'Internet appear to flow from the fact that the writers thereof have never read a book. Not even one, be it long or short. A key sign of the general rot is that "writers" – even ones who should probably know better – have begun using prepositions indiscriminately. In? On? With? For? Who cares? Just stick it in and let God sort it out. Is that verb transitive or intransitive? What's a verb? But that's fine, too because any verb will do: feel free to use "to be" or "to have" to replace any verb, no matter the context.
Evidently, the only thing anyone ever reads nowadays is other people's illiterate blog posts. Some of the silliest stuff in today's writing stems from the Great Unpracticed's attempts to copy the style and speech of their betters – that wouldn't be so bad if "betters" meant, say, T.S. Eliot or Elizabeth Bishop, but unfortunately, it means "just about everybody else on/in/with/for/from/of the planet."
All the above reminds me of the Inevitable Oscar's great quip: "Books used to be written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays, books are written by the public and read by nobody."
That, of course, was Wilde's description of Great Britain's intellectual and cultural state over a century ago. I suppose we have long since sunk to the level of being mighty satisfied with ourselves if we can even carve our collective name into the bark of the nearest tree.
But to be serious for a moment, I suppose we live in a mixed time with regard to English usage. In Shakespeare's day, the rules for English were practically non-existent, and what little one came across seems to have been drawn rather uneasily from Latin grammar. Later, we entered a period of increasingly regularized English, one that seems to be giving way to a new barbarism constituted by the ubiquitous presence of high-tech gizmos that daily seduce us into a kind of electronics-assisted orality. Still, barbarism in language isn't such a bad thing if it's creative – you could call Tudor/Elizabethan England a barbaric age in a number of respects, and that age gave us Shaxspere & Co. Is the same to be said of what Mr. Joyce called "the here and the now of the land of the space of today?"
Have an impactful day! Get out there and be 110% prepared to problem-solve! Happy New Year!
Late last night before the crack of dawn, the Senate approved a last minute physical cliff deal. Moments of high drama gripped an entire nation peering over an abyss; it was as American as lovebirds killing each other with apple pie, and everyone knew that the early bird gathers no moss.
ReplyDeleteAll revenue but no cuts by a thousand deaths, unless we tighten our belts, we’ll sink like a stone. Now the measure moves to the House where Republicans will have to learn how to eat humble crow, butter their nest, ignore the alligators in the swamp and circle the wagons?
There is no use beating each other over the head with a dead horse! The Congressional calendar runneth over.
I fear the Republicans have hoist themselves on their own pop tart again, this may sound good on paper certainly, but it will be a long road to hoe and the failure of such measures is certainly nothing out of the unusual -- but why did this take so long? I mean it's hardly rocket surgery.
DeleteWhen all chickens cross the road at the same time, it’s harder to dodge a pullet.
DeleteAnd it's always so quiet when the horse dies
DeleteI recently read an article asserting that we should "embrace" all neologisms enthusiastically because after all, Shakespeare coined over two thousand of them. I embrace that idea as enthusiastically as my elementary school teachers embraced my argument asserting that Shakespeare couldn't pass a 5th grade spelling test. The idea that anything funny enough was beyond grammatical good and evil didn't sell well either.
ReplyDeleteI keep hearing the claim (or the excuse) by the grammatically "liberated" that the essence of language lies in communication although that claim is usually made without the kind of "communication" that relies on tone and gesture and winks and a daily briefing of the cute "trending" slang of the day. I keep replying that communication; that language itself relies on shared definitions and that the need to know what the Shreveport pimps (excuse me, sex-worker booking agents is more genteel) were saying between 8AM and noon today intentionally interferes with that communication. I'll be wearing my trousers rolled and eating peaches before I ever change anyone's mind about that. (excuse me -- on that)
I don't think Willy's characters ever had bated breath or towed any lines or claimed to be discomfited by the enormity of his new shoes. I arrest my case.
Perhaps TV and forced populism accounts for some of it, but I think so much of the "growth" and change in our language is the result of people trying to sound erudite and refined and failing -- coupled with readers and listeners who think news readers are proper examples -- coupled with authoritative anti-authoritarians insisting in proper English that barking dogs are speaking a language so anything goes. Gee those fireworks last night were noisome! and so it must be because "we need to embrace change" instead of exposing students to books.
Nor stand so much on your gentility,
Which is an airy and mere borrowed thing. . .
-Ben Johnson-
There's an appropriate neologism: genteelism -- the use of euphemism to replace a common word with something, often a long and less accurate phrase deemed more refined by people trying to sound less crude and common -- or sometimes more crude and common. I think it's taught in business school, but it's also a great source of sarcastic commentary. Vide supra with regard to Shreveport booking agents.
I was one told by a high school English teacher that Moby Dick contained too much "elevated" language for high school students. That's a self fulfilling prophecy. We don't need to misunderestimate students as the bard would say. To elevate and to educate -- I think it's the same thing so it must be true by the rules of liberated speech.
Too often "betters" also means street kids, dope peddlers, pimps and hipsters and even people with political and commercial motivations for transforming English into a sales tool. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion that language belongs to the speakers thereof when it seems to belong to the manglers thereof. It's a bit like saying the road belongs to the blind and the drunk. Come to think of it, it does and that's why I usually stay home on New Years eve.
Yes, any preposition will do and "on" usually does best -- just don't ever, ever end a sentence with one -- excuse me on one. It's an error up with which no editor shall put. The same thing goes for proposition, because, like, they sound the same. That's my unanimous and Malapropriate opinion on that, irregardless on whom you is, as the genteel folk would say.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteYes, language is living and dynamic but as you suggest, change cuts both ways. The best state of affairs is probably a productive tension between the forces of change and the forces of erudition and linguistic stasis or shoring-up. Much of the change in our society seems to stem from our idiotic, ersatz worship of all things "youth" (false romanticism and pseudo-rebellion might be good terms to use in that regard) and our addiction to the commercialization of everything and anything.
As for "betters," yes, Shaxspere's best malapropists are fun because they keep trying to reproduce the speech of their social superiors and failing in hilarious ways. Dogberry's a great example, and the younger Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice is good, too, I can fruitify to all and sundry. What they have is bits and shards of culture, scraps of Latinate language, and they don't really know how to pronounce them or put them together. One gets the sense that they can't actually read, or can't read much, but are bent on putting themselves out there as sage, savvy presences. The delightful thing about such characters is that Shakespeare's own audiences consisted in part of people who may not have been particularly educated or even literate in the school-sense, but they reveled in the beauty and intricacies of language and were probably very much alive to the deliciousness of Gobbo's or Dogberry's word-mangling.
In a lower key, people today who don't read say things like "could of" and "neck in neck" because, of course, they never read anything and that's the way such expressions sound. Much reading of books may be weariness of the flesh (for the Good Book tells us so), but much not-reading of any books produceth a fallow mind and a foolish manner.
The point to be made about "knowing the rules" is a cruel one that I find it hard to state without some uneasiness: in a culture that is even partially literate, if you don't know at least the most important rules about speaking and writing, you will end up marking yourself as a buffoon, as someone who may have a good heart and perhaps even a few good ideas but who is not to be taken seriously, not a "player" in whatever game is being played. As so often, what language "expresses" isn't necessarily what we think we are are "getting across," and a term such as "communication" scarcely begins to capture what's going on when language is in play.
Mixed metaphors are the Hickory, Dickory Schlock of our time and one of the four fundamental mood groups of grumpy cephalopods. I mean, when someone sez sumtin stoopid like this: “ Im like w8tng 4 the day 4 tht 2 hapn. Itz like so mch ezir 2 rd a papr whn thrz only lk 4 pgs 2 rd. Like U dnt hv 2 rd all thz big wrdz & stf...,” how else can you kick the fucket!
DeleteAlas, poor Dogberry, a fellow of infinite indigestion. . . I resemble him Horatio.
DeleteOh well,
time to take the 3.14159265358979323846264334 out of the oven