Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual THE LANGUAGE SNOB, REINVENTED Your basic language snob— that, friend, would be me— is never out of work. Just as he gets his wind back after railing about one or another overworked or...
...Pure goofyisms are always pleasing to the language snob...
...I'd like to meet the man who sold her that cell phone with a hook...
...The sports page of the New York Times recently referred to Shaquille O'Neal as weighing "330-something pounds...
...I don't like to be thanked for sharing, either, as I recently was for giving someone my phone number...
...I first encountered "sharing" at the National Endowment for the Arts, where people seemed always to want to share their experiences...
...Gerald M. Levin, CEO of AOL Time Warner, recently claimed to be "enthralled" by a new business idea, when he really meant that he was "thrilled...
...14, 1998) is available in the public prints, the airwaves, and what is amusingly called civilized discourse...
...I don't cotton to being referred to as "guys" by youthful waiters, especially when no one at our table is under sixty and one woman is in her nineties...
...The something-suffix is on its way to serving as the equivalent for numbers of the flying whatever, so that we shall soon have someone described as "seven-foot-something," distances between towns as 200-something miles, marriages lasting "two-decades-something...
...What—so to speak—ever...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...The former means reduce by a tenth, and once meant "kill one in every ten," a thing Romans were wont to do when capturing a town that put up resistance...
...Fun isn't anywhere near a good enough adjective for gossip, which can be witty, subtle, crude, amusing, or vicious...
...The best language snobbery— which isn't snobbery at all—concerns those items that go to a concern about the deprivation of the language by lazy linguistic constructions...
...People seem to be reinventing themselves everywhere one looks these days...
...Movie stars, athletes, politicians—everybody's doing it...
...Everyday evidence of the inefficacy of my fulminations against the words focus (WEEKLY STANDARD, Oct...
...Reinventing oneself" is another phrase that can use serious overhaul, with a view to being put on the list of ought-to-be endangered terms...
...Bryan A. Garner, in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, calls decimate a "skunked term," or word now too heavily freighted with ambiguity to be used at all...
...A reporter in the New York Times's "Vows," always good for a Sunday morning laugh, reports that, when a young woman first went out with the man she would eventually marry, her "cell phone was ringing off the hook...
...offensive to normal tastes or sensibilities"—but I cannot bear his regularly misusing "differential," as in "The Lakers have wiped out a twelve-point differential in the third quarter," when what he really means is difference...
...Sometimes your language snob lies in wait, happy to pounce when people lapse into error by turning their pretensions up just a notch...
...Just as he gets his wind back after railing about one or another overworked or idiotically used word, fresh misusages appear to cause him to get his knickers in a fine new twist...
...With freshly twisted knickers, then, I persevere, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...
...Soon after we were hearing about twenty-somethings and forty-somethings, though not yet ninety- and hundred-somethings...
...its use is a sign of a refusal to search out a more distinguishing, and thereby more vivid, word...
...I can bear the basketball announcer Marv Albert's fulsome toupee—fulsome: "abundant to excess...
...A personal reinvention is, I gather, something akin to a makeover of the soul, usually implying a return in a new guise, always of course in improved form...
...A "differential" is a gear in a motor, a kind of equation, and a few other things, but never a twelve-point lead...
...The use of sharing is slipping out of control...
...Good luck...
...Take the no longer so new use of fun as an adjective, as in "fun time," "fun guy," "fun couple," "fun decade," "fun serial killer...
...even when used correctly, that is, it is likely to be taken wrongly...
...Did he, do you suppose, sell her a wall to go with it...
...Sometimes my language snobbery kicks in through pure personal pique...
...Used in this way, "guys," I suspect, has very unhealthy roots in political correctness...
...28, 1996) and icon (WEEKLY STANDARD, Dec...
...Another word in need of the firing squad is the suffix something, which had its beginning, I believe, on the television show thirtysomething...
...Frank Rich, reviewing a recent biography of the choreographer Jerome Robbins, refers to the "smattering of fun gossip" in the book...
...the waiter or waitress cowers behind the pseudo-friendly "guys...
...Rather than say, "Would you gentlemen [or ladies] care for dessert...
...Fun is, in fact, almost never good enough in any of its new usages...
...Merely to hear them use the word made me wish I were instead at a small table in Vegas, being attacked by Don Rickles...
...Decimate in place of "devastate" or "destroy" is a golden oldie in this line, misused by too many people to name...
Vol. 6 • August 2001 • No. 44
