This is morning I heard a newscaster deliver the line, "None of the injuries is life-threatening." I think it should have been, "None of the injuries are life-threatening." Of the two, which do you think is correct?
And Randy do you know the term form a word which has opposite meanings dependent on context? e.g. "Cleave". One can cleave and apple. One can cleave to a friend.
It's not only knowledge of grammar that is lacking now, despite English (and presumably most languages) having plenty of formal rules which if used properly make it concise, precise, elegant, and mellifluous; but more recently more and more people seem unable to understand the real meanings of ordinary words, basic tenses and simple prefixes and suffixes. (I wonder if those last two plurals ought to use 'x' instead of 'c'.) They know what they want to say. the listener or less often reader gains some sense of the message, but the speech becomes awkward, clumsy and loses credibility. Examples:
The most unique. (It either, is or isn't, unique. The 'uni' element means 'one' or 'alone'.)
Revert back. Tautology
Meet with. ditto
Content instead of contents. (Thanks to Microsoft muddling the adjective of mood, with the noun for something packed or contained).
Mobile / Portable. Ever since the UK's telecommunications trade called what Americans call "cell-phones", "mobile phones". ("Cell" is a contraction of "cellular', the network's arrangment.)
Affect / effect. The former might produce the latter.
Inquiry / Enquiry. By UK use, an Inquiry (formal investigation) makes many Enquiries. I think America tends to use "inquiry" for both.
Commute / shop / build, in noun form where meant as verbs. ('the daily commute, the weekly shop and its spend, new-build houses')
The suffix "tional" and variants where "ing" is shorter and sounds far better, as in 'Inspirational', a clumsy, longer version of "inspiring'. "...ize / ise" is often over-used, too.
Poor use of 'pre' where implicit in the word itself: you cannot "pre-order" or "pre-book" something! This comes from advertising, not the most literate of trades, generally.
Lazy plurals of Graeco-Roman rooted plurals. Sports use 'stadia', governments use 'referanda', mathematicians use 'formulae'; not the rather ugly '~ums' and '~as'. Blame William Gates for the last, particularly in MS Excel, which he's ruined anyway for much serious technical use. His software also refuses to let me use the proper plural of 'forum' correctly. Its unwonted and unwanted 'auto-correct' insists on changing the word I type, into 'for a'; and I have not yet found how to stop it.
Using the Present Tense for past and future events. Lesser novelists and many historians are fond of the former - "The Renaissance is a time of great change across Europe". When challenged, some use the pretentious excuse of calling it the "Historical Present"! Some weather forecasters are as guilty - "Today and tomorrow stay mainly cloudy with sunny spells; looking ahead, Tuesday is general sunny...", when it's still Sunday.
A peculiar trait that's crept into spoken English in the UK over the last few years, is refusal to pronounce the definite article with a soft 'e' before a soft vowel. This is not only jarring to hear, it is also jarring to speak, because it forces a sudden glottal stop: I have tried it. I know many Americans have always done this, and in Britain the Scots seem more prone than the rest, so for both it may be a matter of accent; but the soft 'e' version was always that taught in UK English. Jarring anyway, when you hear it in a period drama on the radio, as I did this afternoon, it is a much an anachronism as an incorrect sound effect or acting speaking with one's mouthful (and on TV, just as trying to eat a solid meal with just a fork, and that held upside-down, would be utterly wrong in an episode of something like Downton Abbey or Midwives). I have also heard modern Americanisms like "targeting" used similarly far out of place and time, such as by NE English characters in BBC R4's WW1 serial Home Front - these may seem small points but they show sloppy writing and spoil the dramatic illusion, rather as the film Titanic was said to have been so rich in visual errors that it developed a loyal band of mistake-spotters.
Oh yes, language changes all the time, but the marked difference between past and present, is in how it is changing. Now, it seems led by ignorance rather than prose fashion. A 19C text might seem flowery and long-winded to us, but is clear because the words meant as they should, and their definitions have not altered significantly since. Changes were in sentence style, and by slow evolution, often reflecting contemporary social conventions. New words came into being from science and engineering, but these too had definite meanings. Now, the change is rapid, not just constructively to accommodate newly-invented objects and ideas, but destructively by basic ignorance, partly fuelled by the rapid growth of the Internet, multi-national businesses and huge political groups dominated by just a few people of variable technical ability but generally mediocre literacy.
Even those words that have changed their meanings and spellings over centuries, were by and large always used correctly for their time, irrespective of the prose style; especially from the late 18C onwards when the increasing commerce, learning and literacy demanded a more formal approach to spelling, grammar and contents. Now, it seems definitions no longer matter, and unless you are a barrister or judge whose work depends on very accurate language, neither do concision, precision and elegance, of both language and diction.
(I know 'accuracy' and 'precision' are not synonyms; but I can't remember the difference, though it matters in fields like science and engineering, and probably the law.)
In one of his books, the American travel-writer Bill Bryson ruefully remarked something like (from my memory), "We used to build churches, houses and bridges, and called it civilisation. Now we build shopping-malls". He was commenting on the ugliness of out-of-town supermarkets - vast sheds totally out of keeping with their surroundings. Perhaps one could comment similarly on their linguistic contemporary, the last few decades' worth of changes to the English Language.
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This post was edited by Durdle at February 26, 2017 6:56 PM MST
