A big drawback to a column like this is being perceived as having insufferable attitude: \u201cSo, Mr. Expert, I guess you think you\u2019re so superior.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not like that. Word nerds do custodial work. A lot of brilliant people can\u2019t write. Ernest Hemingway was a terrible speller. Word nerds don\u2019t think they\u2019re \u201cbetter\u201d\u2014do janitors think they\u2019re better than the office workers they clean up after?<\/p>\n
I often wonder why I bother about details that concern so few normal people. Oh, I know what Arthur Conan Doyle said: \u201c[T]he little things are infinitely the most important,\u201d but on the other hand, I once saw Dick Cavett take a swipe at noted Harvard law professor-author Alan Dershowitz by correcting his grammar. Dershowitz made a sour (but unperturbed) face and shot back that unlike Cavett, he was too busy making a difference in the world to worry about language trivia.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s not about word nerds\u2019 delusions of superiority. We feel like anachronisms, displaced in a world of shifting values and priorities. We live in an idealized past. We each have our own preferred era, be it the time of Shakespeare or Swift or Dickens or Twain or Shaw, when people read a lot more and savored the mot juste<\/em>.<\/p>\n Oh, and everyone you knew could write, spell, and punctuate, and felt enriched by a good vocabulary.<\/p>\n Anyway, onward to this week\u2019s entries of infamy\u2026<\/p>\n Irregardless<\/strong> I\u2019ve heard a lot of bright people say this nonsense word, which results from confusing and combining regardless<\/em> and irrespective<\/em>. If people would just think about it, what\u2019s that dopey ir-<\/em> doing tacked on? In technical terms, ir-<\/em> is an \u201cinitial negative particle.\u201d So if \u201cirregardless\u201d means anything, it means \u201cnot regardless\u201d when its hapless speaker is trying to say the exact opposite.<\/p>\n Center around<\/strong> The whole play centers around the consequences of ill-gotten gains.<\/em> This common, misbegotten expression results from the unhappy union of two similar terms: center on<\/em> and revolve around<\/em>. Because the phrases are roughly synonymous, if you use them both enough, they merge in the mind. What\u2019s annoying about \u201ccenter around\u201d is that it\u2019s imprecise, and disheartens readers who take writing seriously. The center is the point in the middle. How, exactly, would something center around? You get dizzy trying to picture it.<\/p>\n Hone in<\/strong> This is another mongrel, like the two that preceded it. It\u2019s the brain-dead combo of hone<\/em> and home in<\/em>. We simply can\u2019t allow confusion to be the basis of acceptable changes in the language. In recent years, \u201chone in\u201d has achieved an undeserved legitimacy for the worst of reasons: the similarity, in sound and appearance, of n<\/em> and m<\/em>. Honing<\/em> is a technique used for sharpening cutting tools and the like. To home in<\/em>, like zero in<\/em>, is to get something firmly in your sights: get to the crux of a problem.<\/p>\n Reticent<\/strong> This trendy word properly means \u201cuncommunicative,\u201d \u201creserved,\u201d \u201csilent.\u201d But sophisticates who like to fancy up their mundane blather are now using it when they mean \u201creluctant.\u201d I was reticent to spend so much on a football game.<\/em> When I hear something like that, I wish the speaker would just reticent the heck up.<\/p>\n Allude<\/strong> Allude to<\/em> means mention indirectly. In one of its most unspeakable moves, Webster\u2019s lists refer<\/em> as a synonym. Horrors! When you refer<\/em> to something, it\u2019s a direct transaction: I refer to Section II, paragraph one, Your Honor<\/em>. When you allude<\/em> to something or someone, you don\u2019t come out and say it; you\u2019re being subtle, sly or sneaky: \u201cSomeone I know better wise up.\u201d<\/p>\n Off (of)<\/strong> “Hey! You! Get off of my cloud,” sang the Rolling Stones, unnecessarily. The of<\/em> is extraneous, and off of<\/em> is what\u2019s known as a pleonasm<\/em>. That means: starting now, avoid it.<\/p>\n Couple (of)<\/strong> Hey, gimme a couple bucks, wouldja<\/em>? When I was a kid, this is how neighborhood tough guys talked, while cracking their chewing gum. Don\u2019t drop the of<\/em>; one more little syllable won\u2019t kill you.<\/p>\n This grammar tip was contributed by veteran copy editor and word nerd Tom Stern.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A big drawback to a column like this is being perceived as having insufferable attitude: \u201cSo, Mr. Expert, I guess you think you\u2019re so superior.\u201d It\u2019s not like that. Word nerds do custodial work. A lot of brilliant people can\u2019t write. Ernest Hemingway was a terrible speller. Word nerds don\u2019t think they\u2019re \u201cbetter\u201d\u2014do janitors think […]<\/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":[10,12,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-definitions","category-effective-writing","category-humor"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971"}],"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=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}