{"id":980,"date":"2013-07-04T10:04:38","date_gmt":"2013-07-04T16:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=980"},"modified":"2020-11-25T10:25:29","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T16:25:29","slug":"the-media-made-me-do-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/definitions\/the-media-made-me-do-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The Media Made Me Do It"},"content":{"rendered":"

I heard from a correspondent who hates the phrase gone missing<\/em>. His e-mail called it an \u201cear-abrading\u201d and \u201cvulgar\u201d usage. \u201cSends me right round the bend, mate!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I did a little digging and found that he\u2019s far from alone. \u201cGone missing,\u201d according to a word nerd at the Boston Globe, is \u201cthe least loved locution of the decade.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the Globe piece, this \u201cchiefly British\u201d phrase has been around since the 19th century, so it\u2019s not some trendy new grotesquerie. It\u2019s also not ungrammatical\u2014if you can go insane, you can surely go missing. So what makes people hate it so much?<\/p>\n

Especially considering the lack of a good alternative: I’ve always felt that “vanished” and “disappeared” sound as if the missing person was the victim of a magic trick. And “turned up missing”? Please spare me. Anybody with something better than gone missing<\/em>, please write.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s that we have a complicated relationship with European savoir-faire<\/em> in general\u2026and the Brits in particular. Young American males, for instance, deal with a perceived sophistication gap, believing with some justification that English accents and guys named Colin get all the babes.<\/p>\n

Ever since that little 18th century uprising of ours, many Americans traditionally have viewed Mother England with an uneasy mix of nostalgia and rebellion, so Brit-isms such as \u201cgone missing\u201d can be irksome. Don\u2019t you get irrationally annoyed when your artsy friend says, \u201cLet\u2019s wander about\u201d instead of \u201caround\u201d? Or how about those people who write their phone numbers with periods instead of hyphens: 555.2940 instead of 555-2940\u2026why do I hate that? Even someone putting that heinous horizontal bar through a 7 makes me crazy: \u201cLook at me; I\u2019ve been overseas, and now even my 7\u2019s are refined.\u201d<\/p>\n

How many otherwise sensible Americans are mesmerized by Britain\u2019s royal family? And from Cary Grant to Hugh Grant, there\u2019s never been a shortage of British actors in Hollywood. In the early days of talkies, except for gangsters, cowboys, and blue-collar parts, leading men and women had distinct English accents, even though some of them came from Hell\u2019s Kitchen.<\/p>\n

Now that my correspondent has exposed my unthinking use of \u201cgone missing,\u201d it\u2019s made me a kinder, gentler word nerd. Remember how the old, intolerant word nerd always blamed pretentiousness when people said \u201cmore importantly,\u201d \u201cclose proximity,\u201d or \u201ccomprised of\u201d? I was being too hard. In fact, we are bombarded with these expressions daily by high-profile media hotshots till our resistance breaks down. With repetition by smug authority figures (who couldn\u2019t pass English 101), some of the worst barbarities gain respectability.<\/p>\n

Since we\u2019re on this subject, let\u2019s look at some words that broadcasters mangle.<\/p>\n

Envelope, envoy, enclave<\/strong> Though you\u2019d never know it from what you hear over the airwaves, the preferred pronunciation of these words\u2019 first syllable is \u201cenn\u201d rather than the faux-French \u201cahn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alleged<\/strong> It must come as a shock to many announcers, but alleged is a two-syllable word. It\u2019s pronounced uh-LEJD, not uh-LEDGE-id.<\/p>\n

Camaraderie<\/strong> is a five-syllable word, but you usually hear only four in the media. That letter a<\/em> before the r<\/em> should be a clue to say comma-ROD-ery, not com-RAD-ery.<\/p>\n

Bestiality<\/strong> Everyone\u2019s wrong about this one, because it\u2019s not BEAST-iality. Look at the spelling and then tell me: how do you pronounce b-e-s-t?<\/p>\n

Homage<\/strong> This word has spun out of control in the last several years, but for most of my adult life it was correctly pronounced HOMM-ij. Then came AHM-ij, and it went downhill from there. Now we have everyone sounding oh-so-elegant with the pseudo-sophisticated oh-MAHZH, for which there\u2019s really no excuse.<\/p>\n

This grammar tip was contributed by veteran copy editor and word nerd Tom Stern.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard from a correspondent who hates the phrase gone missing. His e-mail called it an \u201cear-abrading\u201d and \u201cvulgar\u201d usage. \u201cSends me right round the bend, mate!\u201d he said. I did a little digging and found that he\u2019s far from alone. \u201cGone missing,\u201d according to a word nerd at the Boston Globe, is \u201cthe least […]<\/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-980","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\/980"}],"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=980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}