My fellow word nerds often send me cheerfully exasperated emails. I\u2019d like to share a few of them with you \u2026<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0My recent aggravation is the mispronunciation of the word \u201cdivisive\u201d by many people I respect. They prefer to say \u201cdivissive,\u201d with a short rather than a long i. These otherwise articulate people are grating on my sensitive nerves.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n This pronunciation has become epidemic in the last decade. Numerous office holders and just about all the political pundits of the airwaves seem to have simultaneously anointed \u201cdi-viss-<\/em>ive\u201d\u2014and I wonder why. I have a glut of dictionaries around the house; some are very recent, some go back seventy years. Only my notoriously permissive 1999\u00a0Webster\u2019s New World<\/em>\u00a0acknowledges this renegade alternative pronunciation. All the others allow but one option: \u201cdi-vice<\/em>-ive.\u201d I guess I can understand how \u201cdi-viss-<\/em>ive\u201d could happen: by extrapolating from\u00a0division<\/em> instead of\u00a0divide<\/em>. Still, it\u2019s always jolting to see yet another tsunami of ignorance wipe out a long-established usage in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0What really gets me is the forgotten use of \u201can.\u201d As in \u201cI went to the zoo and saw a elephant\u201d instead of \u201can elephant.\u201d Have you noticed?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I hear and see this all the time now. Just recently my local paper reported on \u201ca entertaining and informative work.\u201d Maybe an innocent typo, but the way things are going, who knows? My guess is we have the sports world to thank for this, with an assist from hip-hop culture.<\/p>\n It\u2019s often employed for emphasis. You\u2019ll hear an athlete-turned-analyst such as the peerless Charles Barkley say something like, \u201cThey have a actual point guard.\u201d When you say two short vowels in succession like that, without the\u00a0n\u00a0<\/em>in\u00a0an\u00a0<\/em>to smooth things out, you tend to pause after the first\u00a0a<\/em>, and that break emphasizes \u201cactual point guard,\u201d and makes it stand out in the sentence. This can be effective, but it\u2019s still an illiteracy. And this annoying little habit is not confined to ex-athletes and DJs. I hear it more and more from a lot of old pros who seem to find it fresh, or \u201cstreet,\u201d and are doing it deliberately.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0When people writing or speaking cannot think of a graceful way to connect one part of a sentence to another, they insert \u201cin terms of.\u201d I call it the Universal Joint of English.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The more one thinks about in terms of<\/em>, the less sense it makes. Still, this is true of a lot of idioms.\u00a0In terms of<\/em>\u00a0is OK when used sparingly. But try listening to a radio or TV broadcaster for ten minutes without hearing at least one\u00a0in terms of<\/em>. Too many people overuse it; some say it twice in one sentence. The least they could do is break up the monotony with when it comes to<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0in regard to<\/em>\u2014sometimes\u00a0as for<\/em> or simply about<\/em> works just fine, too.<\/p>\n Once you start noticing these verbal tics and crutches, they rankle like a roomful of sneezing in-laws. I recall one commentator who started every other sentence with \u201cThe, uh\u201d: \u201cWhat\u2019s your favorite Shakespeare play?\u201d \u201cThe, uh \u2026\u00a0Hamlet<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n I got to where I could predict his next\u00a0The, uh<\/em>\u00a0with ninety percent accuracy. I would just wait, teeth grinding, for that inevitable\u00a0The, uh<\/em>\u00a0and not hear anything else he said.<\/p>\n \u2014Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My fellow word nerds often send me cheerfully exasperated emails. I\u2019d like to share a few of them with you \u2026 \u2022\u00a0My recent aggravation is the mispronunciation of the word \u201cdivisive\u201d by many people I respect. They prefer to say \u201cdivissive,\u201d with a short rather than a long i. These otherwise articulate people are grating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-effective-writing","category-pronunciation"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}