Just the other day, I groaned as I read the following headline: “There’s 500 reasons to remove income cap for Social Security taxes.”
There’s, meaning there is, refers only to one, certainly not to 500. What happened to are, which refers to any number more than one. There are two, but there also are 500.
What about “the student complained about extra homework and they refused to do it.” How on earth can one student morph into two or more students in a simple sentence? I understand the modern criticism that a student’s gender should not be revealed; however, promoting bad grammar is not the answer.
Simply make students (then they could be any gender) plural and “they” becomes appropriate usage. Or, refer back to one student and say “a student complained … and that student refused …”
Whenever I hear someone answer the question “how are you?” with “I’m good,” I want to ask, “Were you bad?” Confusing the adjective “good” with the adverb “well” is a common, but foolish mistake. “Good,” an adjective modifying a noun, means good person or good dog as opposed to a bad person or a ferocious dog. “Well,” an adverb modifying the verb, feel, refers to one’s physical or mental condition; one either feels well or not so well, perhaps sick or tired or depressed.
Unfortunately, however, not a day goes by when I don’t hear someone say, “John told a story to my friend and I.” Tell a story to I? Or, one often hears, “It was between he and I.” No, no, no! I, he, she, we, and they are all subjective. These pronouns lead the sentence. Me, him, her, us, and them are objective, that is, the object of the verb or preposition (of, for, against, with, to, between and so on).
Another common mistake, this one made by an NBC commentator, is confusing between (two) and among (three or more). The commentator said, “We need 100,000 votes between three states,” when he should have said “among three states.” Or the famous chef who said he “floated between his six restaurants.” “Between” should have been “among” and, as to “floated,” I’ll leave that to the readers’ imaginations.
When people make mistakes in grammar, whether in speaking or in writing, their listeners and readers wonder how smart or how educated they really are. In a New Yorker interview, writer Lydia Davis claims that often “language makes us misunderstand one another.” That is certainly true with jargon.
When people use jargon in speaking or in writing — usually to make themselves sound intelligent or perhaps trendy — listeners and readers consider them pompous or foolish and sometimes just plain silly. For example, saying “intentionality” instead of “intent,” or “functionality” instead of “function,” which just sounds silly.
Often, with jargon, it is impossible to know what is meant.
Some recent examples: On National Public Radio, an education consultant, during an interview, spoke about “granularity.” An educator myself, I had no idea what she meant. Nor did I understand Dan Eberhart, a CEO and Republican fundraiser, also interviewed on NPR, when he said, “Our policy prescriptions are a little bit … outside the bandwidth.” Does “bandwidth” mean strange or out of the ordinary? Yet, in an “Ask Amy” column, a woman claimed that she didn’t want to share her arduous experience with in-vitro fertilization with her husband’s coworker’s wife. “I really won’t have any extra bandwidth for her,” she wrote. Is this “bandwidth” a synonym for time? I haven’t a clue.
In one of my alumni magazines, I recently read about a graduate student who said she was “in the process of workshopping her writing.” “Workshop” is a noun and changing nouns into verbs usually sounds strange. A similar example is “wardrobing.” Yes, one’s clothes are considered one’s wardrobe, but when you get dressed, are you “wardrobing into your wardrobe”? I don’t think so.
Every few years a new buzzword seems to invade our language. For a while, everything was “relevant.” Then, when computers were mass-marketed, people were busy “interfacing” with each other! The latest jargon word seems to be “unpacking.” Once upon a time, people came home from their vacations or their business trips and unpacked their suitcases. Not lately. Whether on the radio, or TV, in newspapers and magazines, people are “unpacking news,” “unpacking opinions,” “unpacking situations and stories,” and the list goes on.
But, regarding jargon, the very worst, I think, is the use of “spitball.” As I recall, way back in elementary school, a nasty child would crumple up a piece of paper, douse it with saliva, and throw it at another child. Somehow, over the years, that obnoxious term is used by actual professional people, as in a literary agent who “wants to spitball ideas with a client.”
If, as Lydia Davis said, “language makes us misunderstand one another,” this is not a good prediction for the future.
Lynne Agress ([email protected]) teaches in the Odyssey Program of the Johns Hopkins University and was president of BWB-Business Writing Inc., a writing and editing consulting company. She is the author of “The Feminine Irony” and “Working with Words,” as well as numerous articles, reviews and opinion pieces.
