Words and Music

Twelve months to the day since my last post. Clearly the day after Boxing Day is the day when I take stock and attempt to prioritise my activities. It may seem that blogging should not be placed very high on one’s to-do list, but I believe that it is important for my mental well-being to vent, from time to time, my feelings of annoyance and frustration at the indignities inflicted on the English language.

One distressing example of this is the combining of two words that should not be combined because the combination already exists and has a different meaning or different usage from the one intended. A rather inelegant sentence, but a couple of examples will serve to clarify my meaning.

“Everyday” is an adjective meaning “commonplace”, “ordinary”, “usual”; for example “Being hit over the head with a baseball bat is not an everyday experience”.  “Every day” is an adverbial phrase meaning “on each day without exception”; for example “He washed his socks every day“.  Of course, the first of these examples could be expressed differently: “It’s not every day that one is hit over the head with a baseball bat”; the second, however, could not.  “He washed his socks everyday” is just plain wrong.

Or rather should be wrong.  Unfortunately this drip-by-drip erosion of correct usage is probably unstoppable.  Another example is the use of “forever” when what is meant is “for ever”.  The first means “time and again”, “repeatedly”; the second means “for all time, continuing into the future without end”.  I’m forever complaining about the misuse of language, but it’s unlikely that I will be doing so for ever.

This piece has been written rather hurriedly, owing to (not “due to”) a minor illness in the household, and perhaps my examples have not been chosen judiciously enough; be that as it may, these are real assaults on our language and should be resisted by all who love her.

In ranting against the current ignorance and ineptitude displayed by people who should know better – i.e. those who earn a living from the use of words – where does one start? The misuse of apostrophes has been covered comprehensively by Lynne Truss in “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, but the popularity of this admirable book doesn’t seem to have led to any improvement.

It’s often hard to see any logic behind the insertion of unnecessary apostrophes. Some people are apparently uneasy about the plurals of words ending in a vowel (other than ‘e’), for example “cameras”, “zebras”, “pianos” and of course “tomatoes”.

One can sympathize with this to some extent, because such plurals sometimes look odd and there’s often some doubt about whether to insert an ‘e’ before the ’s’; but there’s a very simple rule concerning apostrophes: PLURALS NEVER HAVE AN APOSTROPHE (unless of course you’re talking about something that belongs to the plural object in question, like “the pianos’ keyboards” meaning the keyboards of more than one piano).

With a rule as simple as that, how do so many people get it wrong? Is it some form of mild dyslexia that affects a large percentage of the population? In my mailbox this morning I received a newsletter from the booking manager of a swing band which contained the following: “The gigs in both Los Angeles & Washington DC had a highest ever attendance, with over 850 dancers braving the sub-zero temperature’s … “.

What on earth possessed him to put in that rogue apostrophe? “Temperature” is just a normal word; it’s not an abbreviation, it’s not foreign, it doesn’t end in an ‘a’ or an ‘o’ – how can anyone with a claim to being even moderately literate write “temperature’s”? If he were my booking manager I’d sack him.

A note from the Department Of Stating The Bleedin’ Obvious (aka the West Oxfordshire District Council): Among things you CANNOT put in your recycling box is “Anything too large to fit in the box.”

… and I do mean English. As she used to be spoke by reasonably well-educated English people. I’m an old fogey. I’m a grumpy old man. I’m just old.

In my 68 years I’ve seen and heard many changes in the way English is written and spoken. Not all of them are bad. A living language must and does change. However, some of the changes are – in my grumpy old-fogeyish view – regrettable, to say the least.

In this blog (note that I eagerly embrace neologisms such as ‘blog’, a new word to describe a new concept) I shall mostly be charting what I see as the decline of the language, as evidenced by its misuse in newspapers, television, radio and the Web. (Note also that I say ‘radio’, not ‘wireless’ – I’m not that much of an old fogey.)

I don’t quite know where this blog will take me; how it will develop and mutate. I know that the tide of change, most of it for the worse, can’t be stemmed or turned back; but at least I can raise a still small voice of protest amid the prevailing cacophony.

The blog’s title, by the way, is from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson: “Bright is the ring of words, when the right man rings them.”