Watch Your Language
Paula LaRocque / PaulaLaRocque.com
Wherein we examine the condition of the mother tongue. Is its demise imminent? Decidedly not. Is it in distress? No doubt. . . .
People who care about the language are worried. They’re worried that the United States is becoming a nation of illiterates – non‐readers and non‐thinkers. They say that the words of even the leaders and the educators are shoddy and imprecise.
And they have good evidence. A former vice president of the United States says: “The loss of life will be irreplaceable.” A Congressman accuses a colleague of being “myoptic.” A mayor says she hopes a certain effort will be “fruitworthy.” A governor declares that we must identify people’s “skill capabilities.”
Politicians can be laughable, and we do laugh. But listen to this professor at a leading private university discuss an exhibit of icons. The images, she says, “elicit a sense of emotive response.” A university dean says: “This is between you and I” (instead of the grammatical “between you and me”).
We’d expect those pretensions and errors from the students, but in fact we get worse: A college student writes that he needs a “change of paste,” and another that she spent the weekend knitting an African (instead of Afghan). A third says a restaurant has a delightful “hemisphere.”
Some of those students, in turn, become the media’s professional wordsmiths – from whom we hope for grace and accuracy. Instead, many seem not even to know what words mean. A newspaper reporter writes that a committee is “closeted away behind closed doors.” Another says the plane crash occurred during a “pelting drizzle.” A radio reporter comments that merchants are “reticent” to use Canada’s dollar coins, while a story on Indian art in Santa Fe reports that everyone is making money “hand over foot.” A stock market commentator says: “We have a fairly newsy week, economic‐wise.” And a television anchor shows that his math is as lamentable as his language when he describes someone as “half English, half German and half Irish.”
