Misused words
Wherein I answer my first question and explain my general point of view
Naomi Angoff Chedd, of Brookline, Mass., asked me to discuss “misused words and expressions.” This is ironic inasmuch as her request arrived in the mailbox for my Boston Globe “May I Have a Word” column, which challenges readers to invent words or repurpose existing ones to fill gaps in the English language — that is, it’s all about making up or “misusing” words. Nonetheless, the email struck me as the perfect entry point for my inaugural real post here in The Wordshop.
Naomi offered these examples of misuses: “Lots of people say honing in on rather than homing in on. Then there’s very unique, more unique, and most unique. Affect and effect are often confused.”
Right, right, right: I agree with you thrice, Naomi. Let’s notice, though, that you don’t ask me if these are misuses but take for granted that they are, and you also take for granted that I’ll know they are and can explain why.
I do and I can. Home in on, not hone in on, is the traditional, standard idiom. Unique, strictly speaking, means “one of a kind,” so there can’t be greater (or lesser) degrees of it. And in the great majority of contexts, affect is a verb and effect is a noun, as in “Getting a dog affected my mood” and effect is a noun, as in “Her effect on me is mostly wonderful, except when she gets into the garbage.” In less common, mainly professional uses, however, their parts of speech are reversed. (I could say a good deal more about these specific cases, but I doubt most people would find it interesting.)
What Naomi and I are taking for granted here identifies us as relatively sophisticated users of standard English. We take to heart an aphorism usually attributed to Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
Our assumptions do, however, put us in opposition to contemporary dictionaries, whose stated purpose is to describe how people in general use English rather than to endorse, or prescribe, the usages that any group of grandees consider proper. Naomi and I are interested in “standard English,” though dictionaries might have you believe there is no such thing.
A 1992 review in The Boston Globe of the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary (can you imagine? a book review of the latest edition of a dictionary in a major mainstream newspaper!) made the case for our side of the argument concisely. (The AHD was one of the last hold-outs to “prescribe” usage rather than merely “describe” it.)
The review said: “The purely descriptivist view is always in the minority; otherwise no one would ever consult a dictionary. One doesn't open a dictionary simply to find a description, but to find some normative standard in order to avoid making a fool of oneself, or perhaps only to deter the scolding of bores and pedants. Everyone longs for an authority, even if only to flout.”
That’s as true now as it was when it was written. Hence the need for a blog like this one.
My intent with The Wordshop is not at all to be sniffy about the wide range of dialects, registers, codes, whatever you’d call them, in the big tent that is the English language. The tent spans everything from African American English (bussin, finna) to non-American English (squirty cream and zebra crossing in UK English, prepone and timepass in Indian English) to teen-speak (dayger, situationship) to far-right dog whistles (woke, DEI) and to scientific researchers’ strong preference for the passive voice (“The medium was prepared by purging it with a filter-sterilized gas mixture”). These kinds of language suit particular circumstances and serve particular purposes.
Note, though, that once we get into dialects, registers, and so on, we’re no longer talking about standard American English — the kind to be found in most newspapers and on radio and TV news programs, and in textbooks, works of nonfiction, FAQ, descriptions that accompany museum exhibits, and many, many other places. Here there do continue to be standards, even if dictionaries have lost interest in telling their users about them.
Thus, the likes of honing in and most unique are quite different from the in-group uses of language I touched on a few paragraphs ago. They represent good-faith attempts to use standard English by people who aren’t especially familiar with it.
Well, I am capital-F Familiar with it, having been editing the work of professional writers to meet standard English’s standards since at least 1983. Making other people’s language say exactly what it means has been my bread and butter for four decades. It brings me great pleasure to find the exact word — conflate instead of combine, say, or a person’s birthplace instead of place of origin — that I know a writer was looking for. When I find it and propose it, the writer rarely objects.
I especially enjoy knottier problems like untangling confusing syntax, getting verb tenses to line up properly, and finding alternatives to using “this” to refer back to something that has been vaguely suggested rather than clearly presented.
And yet I’m aware that what is or isn’t standard — or better yet, optimal — at any given moment is a matter of opinion; not even we grandees all think alike.
There’s much more to say about when and how and why standard English does change. Its development is to some extent a democratic process. And as with everything else, each of us is entitled to our own opinion — but some opinions are better grounded than others.
Please tell me some of your opinions or ask me for some of mine. I look forward to hearing from you at barbaraswordshop@gmail.