Re: linguistic abuse (was "Loop approach")

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

At 6:11 PM +0100 7/23/02, Steve Lawson wrote:
>My personal bug-bear at the moment is people who say 'literally' 
>when they mean exactly the opposite

I think most people don't even think about what words literally mean; 
they just mimic what they hear other people say. Even those who give 
some thought to the matter generally do so by assumption rather than 
actual knowledge.

To me, "literally" means "to the letter" = "in actual fact." I 
suspect that many people think it means "fictionally" or "as if it 
were found in literature."

This unthinking apery (to use a neologism) is rife. One of my 
particular disfavorites (another neologism?) is "far and few 
between." WTFDTM?!


Of course in many cases such misusages can be amusing. Who among you 
remembers Mrs. Malaprop? Or Reverend Spooner? I'm frequently torn 
between pedantically correcting people for their verbal mayhem and 
letting it go as a lost cause (scattering metaphors as I may).

The watershed between amusement and annoyance is the degree of 
penetration of the verbal gaffe in question. If one person says 
something such as "George W. Bush is arguably a dimwit" it is easy to 
dismiss him/her (not Dubya) as an uneducated (but possibly 
perceptive) peon. When ten people misuse "arguably" in this fashion 
it begins to become distressing, but when the entire English-speaking 
world does so it has to be filed in the lost cause bin. I do, 
however, sometimes use "arguable" with its traditional meaning just 
to confuse the hoi polloi.

For those interested in such things, since 1976 Lake Superior State 
University has published an annual list of mis- or over-used words 
and phrases that are recommended for banishment:

        http://www.lssu.edu/banished/

A few examples:

at this point in time (1976)
do-able (1980)
mandate (1985)
best kept secret (1990)
liberal (1995)
millennium (2000)
negative growth (2001)
disenfranchise (2002)

My personal suggestion for the 2003 list is "at the end of the day."
-- 

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Richard Zvonar, PhD
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