November 2008
Pet Peeves Redux
by Robert C. Cumbow
It’s hard to imagine that I’ve been writing these columns for more than five years now. What got me started was the recognition that third-year law students, among the best-educated people in the world, were turning in papers rife with not only grammatical errors but fundamental grammatical errors the like of which should not be made by anyone past sixth grade. It didn’t take me long to discover that the same sorts of mistakes were being made, with distressing regularity, by practicing lawyers and sitting judges. And so this column was born.
Well, it’s five years later, and the bad news from the front is that little has changed. One of the concerns I expressed in my first column was the abundance of instances of the so-called “grocer’s apostrophe” — the use of an apostrophe-s to designate a simple plural. It’s called that in Britain because of its prevalence in public market signage: “Fresh Beet’s,” “Pea’s and Carrot’s” … you get the idea. It’s more excusable in that context, as many of those who so labeled their wares with crayon on brown paper were — especially in earlier days when the epithet arose — unlikely to have had the benefit of much education. One expects more of someone who has had 8 + 4 + 4 + 3 years of education, most of it spent reading and writing the English language.
Yet on the most recent round of exam papers I graded, even the highest-scoring papers contained grocer’s apostrophes. This is nothing short of astonishing, and it makes one wonder what is being taught in elementary and high school English and college comp classes, let alone our ever more aggressive legal writing programs. Or perhaps I should say not “what is being taught,” because I believe all of these programs emphasize basic grammar and usage; but rather “what is being learned.” Even the brightest students, capable of the sophisticated legal analysis required to get an A in my trademark law class, apparently think the plural of “rule” is “rule’s” — or at least that it’s okay to sometimes use the apostrophe for a simple plural and sometimes not, depending on little more than whim, as if punctuation were an optional form of decoration instead of an essential part of the spelling of a word.
It wasn’t just the grocer’s apostrophe. There were instances of “mislead” when the word intended was “misled”; “plead” instead of “pleaded” or “pled”; and, most amazingly, “enjoinment,” used in response to a question that involved whether a trademark owner would be able to enjoin a particular use of its mark. I believe these students were not unaware of the word “injunction”; but I also believe that several of them had no notion of its connection to the word “enjoin.” The sense that the verb “enjoin” must of necessity involve an “enjoinment” is, I suspect, symptomatic of an increasingly blunt-minded approach to our language, as more and more educated speakers, readers, and writers of English emerge with no awareness of our language’s Latin and Greek roots.
Okay, so I understood what they meant; there was no failure of communication. But language choices not only communicate, they also make an impression. They say something about the speaker or writer who chose those particular words (or non-words). Of course, if the folks who are reading these new graduates’ job application letters are no more sensitive to the rules and nuances of language than the letter-writers themselves, then I suppose the battle is already lost. But some folks out there are still fighting the good fight, because I get letters and e-mail from them — which leads me to this column’s principal topic.
Day of the Peeves
One of the earliest in this series of columns was a round-up of some of my personal pet peeves of language usage — or misusage — the things that send me round the bend. Educated people using the grocer’s apostrophe is one of them; people who say “URL” when they mean “domain name” and news stories that report domain name challenges as demands to take down websites are others. But by virtue of writing these columns I seem to have become a sounding board for the pet peeves of others, so in this installment I’d like to give equal time to some readers’ own concerns.
Just in the past month three different people have complained to me about the increasing use of qualifiers with the word “unique.” The word “unique,” they say, means “one of a kind,” it’s an absolute, nothing can be “very unique” or “most unique.” From the standpoint of strict English, I heartily agree. People who say or write “This is a very unique situation” don’t understand the word “unique.” Of course, not understanding a word has never kept people from using it anyway, if they think it will make them sound smart; though such usage often has the opposite effect. Nevertheless, there are circumstances in which even an absolute term may be given a qualifier, if the intent is humorous. References to being “slightly pregnant” are a permissible jocularity. And I am reminded with pleasure of the moment in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown when drug lord Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) learns that his minion Louis Gara (Robert DeNiro) has bungled a caper and managed to shoot Ordell’s girlfriend into the bargain. “Is she dead?” asks the exasperated Ordell. “Pretty much,” replies the hapless Louis.
Another reader is annoyed by the redundancy that results from people’s declining understanding of the precise meanings of words. He cites a recent earnest reminder from an NPR commentator that we should “pre-plan ahead.” This is actually a triple redundancy: the word “plan” alone would have been sufficient, for there is no planning other than pre-planning, and planning is always done “ahead,” otherwise it isn’t planning.
Sitting in the Water, Dangling Participles
A second example of a triple redundancy, the same reader added, is the phrase “still remains the same,” from the Otis Redding song “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”
I had to smile at that, since that song contains another of my favorite lines: “This loneliness won’t leave me alone” — a line so memorable that it was reused verbatim in the reggae tune “Many Rivers to Cross,” sung by Jimmy Cliff in the film The Harder They Come. That usage, though, is excusable — in fact, admirable — as a witty play on two different meanings of the term “alone.”
Not to disturb the spirit of Mr. Redding too much longer, I nevertheless need also to point out that the song’s title and opening line perpetuate the widespread misunderstanding of what a “dock” is. Mr. Redding was undoubtedly sitting on a pier, not a dock.
The dangling participle is one reader’s pet peeve, and this is another example of a breach of a rule that an increasing number of writers of English seem unaware of. I recently read a book that was, for the most part, very well-written, a riveting account of a historical episode and the great Romantic painting that memorialized it; but the book contained dangling participles on nearly every page, and it was clear that the writer didn’t know there was anything wrong with that. Of course, a careful and thoughtful reader will take a moment to consider what his words mean, and whether that was the meaning he intended to convey to his readers.
The rule is simple enough: If you start a sentence with a qualifying phrase, follow it immediately with the word or phrase that identifies the thing being qualified. I like to think that most people can instantly see what is wrong with a construction such as “As a freshman in high school, his mother left him at home for a month while she went to Paris.” But many people don’t. It’s not so important that a rule has been broken; what’s important is that, rule or no rule, the sentence is awkward. It makes the reader pause, if only for an instant, to note that the freshman in high school was the person who was left alone, not the mother who left. The result is writing that is less effective than it ought to be; writing that, even if only momentarily, distracts the reader rather than compelling her attention.
Newspapers are hotbeds of dangling participles these days, as a generation of less educated and less fastidious editors seeks to save space by revising two sentences into one, often with disastrous results. One such, reported in Nancy Friedman’s superb “Fritinancy” blog (which I enthusiastically commend to anyone who is interested in language), was this San Francisco Chronicle gem: “Originally used by the now-defunct Koret company, one [of] California’s largest apparel-manufacturers, Pinsky says she believes it may be the only one left.” This is a double dangler, because the phrase beginning “originally used” and the phrase beginning “one of” refer to two different things, neither of them Ms. Pinsky.
And Now This
The uneducated or simply careless choice of the wrong word (often a “sound-alike” for the intended word) is another reader’s pet peeve. This common blunder nearly always leads to risible results, as in the recent local news release that referred to an exhibit as a “reprisal of last year’s hit show”; or the guidelines that earnestly recommended applying “the Adopt-Adapt-Reject tenant”; or the collection letter warning a customer that “your account is substantially in our ears.”
To be fair, the last one resulted from dictation. A humorous result that occurs when people write what they think they heard rather than what was spoken is called a Mondegreen, from the phrase “Lady Mondegreen,” a widespread mis-hearing of the line “and laid him on the green” from an old English ballad. The American equivalent is the old hymn “Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear.” But that is a subject for a future installment.
With no peeve to report at all, another reader wrote me about a recent Tacoma Municipal Court ruling that turned on the distinctions among “pig,” “hog,” and “swine.” Yes, they are different — and while the difference may not be as crucial as the difference between “which” and “that,” which is at the heart of an increasing body of judicial opinions involving statutory construction, it made a big difference to one local man who, it turned out, was not barred by law from keeping a pet pot-bellied pig within the city limits. Never doubt the importance of fine distinctions.
I Stand Corrected
Last time I referred in passing to words that “are not ambiguous or ambivalent at all.” A reader reminded me that “ambiguous” means “capable of multiple meaning,” but “ambivalent” means “uncertain as between two possibilities,” such that words can be ambiguous but only people can be ambivalent. Well, even Homer nods, and I fer sher ain’t no Homer. The truth of the matter is that, even if I may seem to preach from time to time, I’m always learning.
In my previous column I asked: “Why do people (and certain software programs) abbreviate ‘out of office’ as ‘OOF’?” I am grateful to the reader who, more schooled in tech talk than I am, explained that it is an abbreviation for “Out Of Facility,” used as a command in Microsoft’s Xenix mail system to identify a user as unavailable. The same reader also advised me of the terms “little r” and “big R” that also arose from the early days of e-mail — useful terms for what we today express as “reply to me only” and “reply all.” The distinction is recognized in Outlook, for those who prefer keystroke commands to mouse-click commands: CTRL+R = reply to sender only; CTRL+Shift+R=reply all.
Robert C. Cumbow is a shareholder at the Seattle firm of Graham & Dunn PC. He teaches at Seattle University School of Law and writes on law, language, and movies. For parts of this column, he acknowledges debts to Chris Eagan, Joe Quaintance, Estera Gordon, Patrick Murray, and the enigmatic and all-knowing “Southie.”
