hypocrisy.com - The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane

In the Middle Egyptian language there is one verb that means “to fare upstream” or “to fare southward,” and another bears the meaning, “to fare downstream” or “to fare northward.”  Those verbs worked perfectly well in the vicinity of the Nile, but when an Egyptian general issued an order using one of them as his troops were deployed next to the Jordan River, they didn’t know which way to go, since the Jordan flows south.  Military operations require unequivocal language.

The demise of the League of Nations was caused in part by the mistranslation of an expression from French into English.  The original stated that “la France demande . . . ,” which was translated as “France demands . . . .”  Many Americans felt that if, after we had bailed them out in World War I, the French were inclined to make demands, we weren’t interested in obliging them.  Demander in French actually means “to request.”

These are just a couple of examples of foulups in language that have made some difference in world history.  It should go without saying that great civilizations must take great care with their languages, using them with precision.  In fact, it has been noted that great civilizations tend to have complex languages—the Russians, the English and the Americans, for example.  The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges remarked that he would have preferred to write in English because, with both Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots, it lends itself to more subtlety of expression than does Spanish.

But at the present time it appears that precision in language is strictly optional.  The problem with this is that language structures thought, and if language is illogical or otherwise sloppy, thought too becomes chaotic.  I’ve noticed that the phase “just might” is almost always inverted today.  “Charlie might just wear a tie to the dance” has quite different connotations than “Charlie just might wear a tie to the dance.”  Or what about the tendency, perhaps based on the song, Nobody Does It Better, to say, “No gasoline cleans your car’s engine better than Chevron with Techron”?  That leaves open the possibility that every other gasoline on the market does it just as well.  “No other gasoline cleans your car’s engine as well . . . ” is not the same thing.

And then there are those lovely dependent clauses floating in space, looking for something to hang onto.  The best one I’ve come across was in a program on Russian rocketry.  In speaking of a particular rocket, the narrator said, “Launched into space three times, the factory that built it still exists.”

“Man, oh, man!,” I said to myself.  “Those Russian factories are formidable.”

Political correctness has also polluted the language, so that singular and plural become mixed up:  “Every person has their own viewpoint.”  Again I submit that when language becomes that dull, the thought expressed in it is not likely to be any sharper.  This goofiness has gone so far that the grammatical error in question is used even when there is no PC purpose for it:  “Each individual species has their own way of dealing with this challenge.”

Oh, but it gets better.  Sometimes an egregious error is made in an attempt to sound sophisticated.  I heard a college president with a Ph.D. in English begin a speech with “This has been an interesting summer for my wife and I.”

That is about as bad as a classic I heard uttered by a first grade teacher:  “Me and her was gonna do that.”  There are four errors in the first four words.

Then there’s my personal favorite:  “these kinds of things” when “things of this kind” would be appropriate.  I get tired of shouting at the TV screen, “How many kinds of things are you referring to, idiot?”

Or how about what I call chain-link sentences?:  “That’s the problem with this team is that it has no running game.”

Many books have been sent to me with requests that I review them for one journal or another.  Some of them have interested me a great deal.  I recall one in particular, produced by a Jewish writer about the experience of his people in Colombia in the 1930s, when that country was one of two in the Americas that had concordats with the Vatican pledging that they would be purely and perpetually Roman Catholic.  I started reading the book with relish.  One image stuck out.  The narrator told of the Jews’ being so poor that the children were admitted free to a movie theater—but were only allowed to sit behind the screen.  This was their reality, the reverse of the accepted point of view in Colombia.

The problem with the book was that, despite the fact that the author was a native speaker of Spanish and held a Ph.D. degree in that language from an Ivy League university, the book contained thousands of errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation.  At one point a character wants to deny something, and says, “No, es verdad” (No, it’s true) instead of “No es verdad” (It’s not true).  I stopped reading and sent the book back to the book review editor of the journal in question.  Still, when I took a book manuscript of mine to a highly recommended typist and she introduced several thousand errors of the same kind (those kinds of errors?)  I began wondering whether that had happened to the Colombian writer as well.  But if so, where was the copy editor in all this?  Someone should have edited those errors out of the book.

Ours is an age when it seems accuracy is optional.  If “Me and her was gonna do that” gets the thought across, it’s acceptable—except in the business world, that is.  One growth industry is straightening up executives’ English usage.  Perhaps it’s time for primary school teachers to stop telling their pupils that grammar, punctuation and spelling don’t matter, that what matters is that they express themselves.  And it may also be time for university professors of English to stop claiming that there is no such thing as standard English.  Are we really to believe that “Me and her was gonna do that” is as correct as “She and I were going to do that”?  Just try speaking that way in your interview for a position in a serious business firm.

And, if I may be permitted just one business cliché, the bottom line here is that sloppy language does tend to reflect sloppy thinking.  We can’t afford that in a world of this kind.

Feel free to pick my little essays apart in search of errors in English usage.  However, if you find that I’ve ended a sentence with a preposition and call me on it, I’ll quote Winston Churchill:  “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

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