Twelve Angry Words

As the current idiomatic heritage is passed to posterity, there seems a strong tendency not only to withhold correction, but also to bestow complete approbation and to characterize a blunder in speech as simply a respectable mode of expression or reflection of individuality, as opposed to a true, genuine, and wholly incorrect screw-up. The blooper reel of the human mind is certainly full of these, and for sure, there’s no shame in that, though I fear certain words may not survive the massacre of language that occurs today with alarmingly rare objection. In the years since I came of age and took to heart the subtleties of accurate usage, the beauty of language, and the true eloquence revealed by those who craft their manner of expression with care and conscience, these are a few of the words that have stood out to me (or perhaps whose ruin has just left me personally the most peevish), twelve with good reason to be irate, for they are the orphaned and abused, living in the foxholes of the English lexicon. They are linguistic piñatas, continually thrashed in the mosh pit of mental laziness by members of nearly every social stratum. Perhaps I put too much
faith in scholarship, but even intelligent, learned professionals continually mispronounce these words. What’s more, I’m not speaking of dialectic errors, as with ask—maybe the most mispronounced word in the English language, most often relegated to “aks” in the parlance of whole cultural strata. Nor am I referring to slang or word slurring, as with “gonna” or “ain’t.” No, the words to which I refer are the mutated scandals of both conversation and elocution, repeatedly bastardized even by well-read people who should know better. And so, in the hope that some who visit the ideas presented here may seek to refrain from committing such verbal mutilation, or as my dad used to say, “murdering the Queen’s English,” and, like a musician who plays a wrong note loudly, embarrassing themselves by uttering falsity and asserting ignorance with caustic boldness, consider the following a kind of abbreviated language lesson, a gift to those who care to sound less ignorant in their discourse and to use these words accurately, in all their linguistic glory. Okay, maybe that’s romanticizing the issue a bit. But if this little treatise can provide the confidence and projection of intelligence and knowledge, and thus the modicum of leverage, needed to convince, for instance, a potential employer of your merit or to persuade an audience of the veracity of your viewpoint, then perhaps my efforts here are not too ridiculous. Nor futile.

Across

Let’s start with the suffix –ed, which means “having,” and which is often dropped from participles that actually need it, as sometimes happens with barbed wire. Not sure what “barb wire” is, but barring the notion that the human tongue is simply too lazy to hit the alveolar ridge just behind the upper front teeth, the problem likely has to do with one’s inability to distinguish the preposition across from the past tense of cross. Regardless, there is actually no such word in the English language as “acrossed,” though you would never know it to listen to many modern conversations.

Cavalry

Let’s just say, the “calvary” doesn’t come to save anyone, nor was Jesus crucified at “Cavalry.” Two distinct words, two distinct meanings. However, if you like, savlation was won at Calvary, and the cavalry might arrive in time to spare you either a horrible death or years of salvery.

Drown

Remember –ed? Well there’s sure no blaming this one on a semantic conundrum like across versus crossed. The bottom line: transitive or intransitive, drown is a verb, and drowned is its past tense and past participle, as in, Ophelia drowned, and thus, she is a drowned woman. But yeah, sorry, no one in the here and now is ever going to “drowned,” at least not in English.

Espresso

[Sigh] Seriously, this word really takes it in the shorts. I would almost not be surprised if blatant ignorance and sheer pandemic tenacity of misuse don’t eventually give way to a new spelling. However, until Webster, Oxford, and American Heritage decide to capitulate and defer to every broker, beach bunny, and soccer mom who doesn’t know what a shot of really strong coffee is, sorry, but how you “espress” yourself doesn’t make “expresso” anything at all. Even so, not sure, at this point, if we can excape it.

Et cetera

Okay, I admit, this one drives me absolutely bonkers, probably more so than the rest, because it seems like everyone (white and blue collar alike) wants to say “eksetera,” and I think I wince, to some degree, just about every time I hear it. So here you go. Two Latin words: et (and) cetera (so forth). Come on, Yul Brynner could do it. As if “expresso” weren’t bad enough, what makes us put the voiceless velar plosive where it doesn’t belong? The consonant sound [k] is voiceless because the voice box doesn’t vibrate, velar because the back of the tongue strikes the soft palate, and plosive because it results from the compression of air in the throat. Honestly, I don’t see what makes it the vernacular magnet it seems to be. There are plenty of consonant sounds far easier to make that aren’t as widely overused. [m] and /v/ have feelings, too. I suppose many prefer to grab their understanding and subtleties of phrasing by ear than through actual reading or study. Then again, I don’t see how you could read this word as many times as you’re like to in the course of a lifetime and take no notice of how it’s spelled. It’s actually quite phonetic, and even the abbreviation etc. shows the c (not even the voiceless velar plosive, but rather the voiceless postalveolar fricative /s/) after the t. Oh well, Latin frequently seems to get the shaft, as with i.e. (meaning id est, or “in other words”), which is constantly confused with another abbreviated Latin phrase, exempli gratia (meaning “for example”), i.e., e.g. Okay, I’m probably the only one who finds that funny. Moving on…

February

Poor [r] is the surely forgotten stepchild of the second calendar month. It seems the alveolar trill just can’t get a break. In everyday use, it’s almost always dropped by a vast majority who want to call these twenty-eight days “feb-yew-ery.” Perhaps two [r]’s connected by two distinct vowel sounds is just too much effort for the ordinary, hard-working, college-educated American. Kind of like the pile of dishes that build up in the kitchen sink, ‘cause the dishwasher that lies anywhere from two to three feet away is just too much trouble for the average joe who’s got a three-hour date with his sofa. Yes, better to ignore ten seconds of chore-dom and live in a nonexistent month. Come on, people!

Height

Contrary to popular belief, no medical consent form, application, or questionnaire ever asked for one’s “heighth,” a form that doesn’t exist in any English dictionary on the face of the earth, probably because… hmm, let’s see… it’s not a word. What’s rather puzzling, however, is that no one ever claims to provide their height and “weighth.” Not sure why the voiceless dental fricative diphthong th is so tenacious here and not there. Maybe it has something to do with the contrast between cardinal numbers and ordinal ranking, as with eight and eighth. And while we’re on the subject, in all seriousness, is there any word with a crazier intersection of consonant sounds than twelfth, which somehow seems to skip through conversations almost unilaterally unscathed? At any rate, given the frequency with which the dipthong asserts itself in this case, I see no end in sighth.

Mischievous

I would say this word lives up to its meaning, but seriously, what’s so hard? Time and again, I hear people trying to say it, but instead, using some unearthly form involving a fourth syllable. It’s so easy, too. With a root like mischief, simply change f to v and tack on an –ous, which of course means “possessing” or “full of.” This is one of the most bizarre of the twelve, because more than any other, I’ve heard a variety of educated people defend what is actually erroneous and insist with total certainty that the correct pronunciation is, in fact, “mischievious.” I guess it really is. How a third i ever got inserted into this word is a phenomenon, to be sure, but even more strange is the fact that so many otherwise well-spoken individuals should so rigorously defend a pronunciation that’s entirely wrong. One would think it more common to drop syllables than to add them when superfluious.

Nuclear

I read somewhere that the British and the Australians find the American tendency to mispronounce this word terribly quaint. Funny how so many of us feel the same way about their accents. Might that be considered a kind of cultural commerce? I’d like to think we have more to warrant regard than some ridiculous and perfectly avertable faux pas. From the President of the United States to vagrants, actors, and schoolteachers, the enemies of this word are many, and for reasons that must transcend simple word slurring in everyday conversation. Indeed, many seem convinced of a “nuculus” at the heart of this word. Its nucleus, however, is at the heart of the matter. Hehe… Oh come on, that was funny. Sort of.

Realtor

One question: what’s a “realator”? Perhaps I can answer that myself. It is a superfluious peresistance of vowowel sounds or sylyllables that people find so irresistabable, they feel an overwhelaming compulsion to rerepeat them. And I guess it’s not surprising to find the inserted sound a schwa (<ə>), probably the most frequently used English vowel sound. Now, for sure, the rules that govern the English language are a frustratingly bizarre hodge-podge of spelling and pronunciation, but what leaves us so hog-tied by the phonetically simple? Better to talk like Cro-Magnon than grabab a cluey?

Regardless

I’m guessing here, but maybe people are thinking of irrelevant or irrespective of when they attempt to say this word, but instead, add –ir where it ends up communicating precisely what they don’t mean. The suffix –less, of course, covers the fact that the speaker means “without regard.” Now, adding an –ir, meaning “not,” simply expresses “not without regard,” which effectively turns the meaning into “with regard.” This is what we refer to in semantics as a double negative. Of course, there are plenty of them in the Romance languages, but native English speakers unfortunately have no excuse.

Sherbet

The composer Franz Schubert was largely unknown in his lifetime and heard precious few of his large-scale compositions actually performed. Maybe this is one of God’s little restitutions, His way of making at least the English-speaking populace veer dramatically close to saying Schubert’s name, though I’d rather they gave his music a chance and stopped using some bastard version of his name to order ice cream made without milk. Actually, it’s made from sweetened water mixed with iced juice or frozen puree. With very little air whipped into it, unlike ice cream, it's basically just another dessert that happens to share a similar temperature. The French call it sorbet, but the origin is a Turkish word derived from the Arabic for “drink” or “juice,” none of which contain a second r. Oh well, if the alveolar trill is the forgotten stepchild of February, it’s certainly the favorite son of “sherbert.” I will say, though I’m sure people aren’t actually confusing Schubert with a frozen dessert, his music is pretty flippin’ sweet.

The annals of linguistic evolution are surely filled with bizarre idiomatic phenomena that led to transformations in usage and rhetoric. One might read the views expressed here and retort by claiming that these subtle variations are the building blocks of the very rules we apply so rigorously in academic discourse. Fundamentally speaking, if I use a word, and you know what I mean by it, then it’s a word, right? Languages are, in fact, built in such a way. Fair enough. But let us not fail to reflect on the cultural inertia that instigates change. For instance, many people actually despise poetry because to look up every word they don’t recognize, so as to glean the full scope of meaning embedded in such a densely packaged form of writing, is just “too much work.” On a grand scale, languages may be born in such ways, but for the individual seeking to establish and to maintain reputation and character and to cultivate relationships (professional or otherwise), this attitude has no place, except to reflect a flagrant disregard for accuracy, delivery, and scholarship. Now-a-days, as we stand in the shadow and liberality of postmodernism, what seems like a heightened aesthetic sensibility, a broader capacity for individual expression, can also reflect a culture of intellectual apathy. Sometimes, people seem to resist understanding in favor of convenience. Let us correct ourselves and reap the educative potential and growth inherent in such correction. In the words of that eminent linguistic referee Henry Higgins, so deliciously penned by Mr. Shaw, ours is “the language of Shakespeare, Milton, the [King James] Bible.” Should we not take care to honor such a formidable legacy by allowing some care for the manner in which we express ourselves? Lest I leave you with an overinflated impression of the importance of avoiding the aforementioned blunders, I freely admit that change itself is a thread that runs the course of history. It’s inevitable. And yet, forget for a moment the linguistic heritage previously mentioned, and let us make sure the academic and cultural heritage we pass to subsequent generations is a sensible one. People change, and language changes with them. But let us hope that the transformed idiom is not symptomatic of a decline in intellectual initiative. The problem is not that people sometimes speak incorrectly, but rather, that they sometimes don’t care, and demonstrate so little concern for how a thought is articulated. Surely there’s a difference between evolution and degeneration, the latter, exacting apprehension, and the former, a marvelous fire from which the most admirable aspects of culture are born.