Dreyer's English

by Benjamin Dreyer

  What does bother or at least bemuse me is the use of “hoi polloi,” with or without the “the,” to refer to rich people, as one runs across every now and then. A favored explanation for this confusion is that “hoi polloi” in such cases is being confused with “hoity-toity,” which you may recognize as a synonym for “fancy-shmancy,”*8 but its being explicable doesn’t make it right.*9

  HOPEFULLY

  If you can live with “There was a terrible car accident; thankfully, no one was hurt,” you can certainly live with “Tomorrow’s weather forecast is favorable; hopefully, we’ll leave on time.”

  “Thankfully” and “hopefully” are, in these uses, disjunct adverbs, meaning that they modify not any particular action in the sentence (as they would in, say, “she thankfully received the gift” or “he hopefully approached his boss for a raise”) but the overall mood of the speaker of the sentence (or simply the sentence itself).

  I’m not sure how “hopefully,” among all such disjunct usages, got singled out for abuse, but it’s unfair and ought not to be borne.

  By the way: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  Ahem.

  ICONIC

  A word whose overuse has rendered it as dull and meaningless as “famous.” Moreover, while “famous” is at least applied to people who are at least reasonably celebrated and widely recognized, “iconic” seems lately to be desperately applied to people who are barely even well known.

  IMPACT (AS A VERB)

  The use of the verb “impact,” in the sense of “affect,” when “affect” might be deemed perfectly appropriate and sufficient, is a true scream inducer. Perhaps you’re already screaming.

  I’m not sure that my job is necessarily impacted by a change in, say, working hours, but perhaps you’re more time sensitive.

  I don’t necessarily hold with the notion that the verb “impact” should never be used for anything less, um, impactful than an asteroid wiping out the dinosaur population of the Earth, but do try to reserve it for big-ticket items.

  IMPACTFUL

  Yet another of those words that carry that unmistakable whiff of business-speak, and it’s not, to my nose, a pleasant scent. If everyone stopped using it, I bet that no one would miss it.

  INCENTIVIZE

  The only thing worse than the ungodly “incentivize” is its satanic little sibling, “incent.”

  INVITE (AS A NOUN)

  If your life expectancy is so limited that you don’t have the time to issue an invitation, you might not be up to throwing that party.

  IRONY

  Funniness is not irony. Coincidence is not irony. Weirdness is not irony. Rain on your wedding day is not irony. Irony is irony. I once copyedited a work in which the author, if he used the phrase “deliciously ironic” once, used it a dozen times. The problem was, nothing he ever said was either delicious or ironic. Which, as a colleague pointed out, was deliciously ironic.

  IRREGARDLESS

  This grim Brundlefly, a genetic mash-up of “irrespective” and “regardless,” is wholly unnecessary. Plus—and don’t pretend otherwise, you’re not that opaque—you know you use it only to irritate people.

  LEARNINGS

  Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you no sense of decency?

  They’re lessons.

  LIAISE

  This back-formation, extracted from “liaison,” bugs some people. I think it’s dandy. I don’t think that its cousins “cooperate” and “collaborate” quite do the trick of describing go-betweening (really, do you want me to say “go-betweening”?), and it’s a damn sight better than the personal-boundary-crossing “reach out.”

  LITERALLY

  A respectable word that has been distorted into the Intensifier from Hell. No, you did not literally die laughing. No, I don’t care that all your cool friends use “literally” thus. If all your cool friends literally jumped off the Empire State Building, would you?*10

  LOAN (AS A VERB)

  The use of “loan” as a verb has always carried, to my ears, a certain Bowery Boys noise—“Hey, Sach, can you loan me a fin?”—and when I see it in text, I tend to automatically change it to “lend.” I will not be put out if you stet me, because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the use of “loan” as a verb.

  MORE (OR MOST) IMPORTANTLY

  If you have a stick up your fundament about “firstly,” “secondly,” and “thirdly,” you likely have a similar stick there re “more importantly,” and I hope you have the room for it.

  MORE THAN/OVER

  This distinction, specifically insofar as counting is concerned, is less controversial than that between “less than” and “fewer than,” mostly because so few people observe it, and also because one is hard-pressed to find anyone in the word biz to defend it. So whether a book is over six hundred pages long or more than six hundred pages long, or whether little Jimmy is suddenly more than six feet tall or suddenly over six feet tall…Do as you like. It’s nothing to get worked up more than.

  MYRIAD

  “Myriad” was a noun well before it was an adjective, so though I appreciate that referring to “myriad travails” is more efficient than referring to “a myriad of travails,” either is just fine, and the noun objectors don’t have much of a leg to stand on here. Feel free, if you’re that kind of person, to point out that John Milton used “myriad” as a noun. Also Thoreau.

  NAUSEATED (VS. NAUSEOUS)

  I don’t think I knew till I was well beyond my college years that there was even such a word as “nauseated.” On those occasions when I was about to heave, I was content to be nauseous. Eventually I learned the traditional differentiation between “nauseous”—causing nausea—and “nauseated”—preparing to heave—but it was too late for me to mend my ways, so I’m still happy, as it were, to be nauseous.

  NOISOME

  “Noisome” means “stinking.” And “harmful.” And, I suppose, “nauseating.” One doesn’t, just this moment, have to peeve about its being mistaken for a synonym for “noisy,” because no decent person asserts or accepts that it is one. But in a world in which “nonplussed”—look down!—has increasingly come to mean “cool as a cucumber,” I say: Better safe than sorry.

  NONPLUSSED

  So then, “nonplussed.” To be nonplussed is to be confused, startled, at a loss for words. Lately the word’s devolved into a synonym for relaxed, cool as a cucumber, chill, and that’s a problem. How has this come to be? Presumably the “plussed” part strikes some eyes/ears as meaning “excited,” so the “non” part seems to turn that on its head, and there you have “nonplussed” serving as its own antonym.*11

  ON ACCIDENT

  Yes, it’s “on purpose.” No, it’s not “on accident.” It’s “by accident.”

  ONBOARD

  The use of “onboard” as a verb in place of “familiarize” or “integrate” is grotesque. It’s bad enough when it’s applied to policies; applied to new employees in place of the perfectly lovely word “orient,” it’s worse. And it feels like a terribly short walk from onboarding a new employee to waterboarding one.

  PASS AWAY

  In conversation with a bereaved relative, one might, I suppose, refer to someone having passed away or passed. In writing, people die.

  PENULTIMATE

  “Penultimate” is not a fancyism for “ultimate.” It does not mean “like totally ultimate, bro.” It means “the thing before the last thing.”

  PERUSE

  I’ve given up on “peruse,” because a word that’s used to mean both “read thoroughly and carefully” and “glance at cursorily” is as close to useless as a word can be.

  PLETHORA

  People who use “plethora” to describe something of which there’s too much—it started out in English as the name of a condition involving an overabundance of blood—sneer grimly at those who
use it simply (and positively) to mean “a lot of something.” I have no dog in this fight.

  REFERENCE (AS A VERB)

  You can just say “refer to.”

  RESIDE

  You mean “live”?

  ’ROUND

  If she’s approachin’ by way of circumnavigatin’ a mountain, she’s comin’ round it, and one can do nicely without a preceding apostrophe. I’m talking to you, people who like to write “ ’til” or, worse, “ ’till.”

  STEP FOOT IN

  For your own safety, I’m telling you, just say “set foot in.” You’ll live longer.

  TASK (AS A VERB)

  I’d rather be assigned to do something than tasked to do it.

  ’TIL

  Once again, for the people in the cheap seats: “Till” is a word. “Until” is a word. “Till” is an older word than “until.” They both mean the same thing. There’s no justification whatsoever for the prissyism “ ’til.”

  TRY AND

  If you try and do something, someone will immediately tell you to try to do it, so you might as well just try to do it so no one will yell at you.

  UTILIZE

  You can haul out “utilize” when you’re speaking of making particularly good use of something, as in utilizing facts and figures to project a company’s future earnings. Otherwise all you really need is “use.”

  VERY UNIQUE

  In the 1906 edition of The King’s English, H. W. Fowler declared—and he was neither the first nor the last person to so declare—“A thing is unique, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique.”

  I will allow that something can be virtually unique but can’t be more than—not very, not especially, not really—unique.

  You might as well hang a KICK ME sign on your writing.*12

  *1  A tip of the hat to my copyeditorial colleague John E. McIntyre, of The Baltimore Sun, who coined the splendid term “peeververein,” defined as “the collective group of self-appointed language experts whose complaints about errors in grammar and usage are generally unfounded or trivial.” As insults go, it’s quite sporty, don’t you think? And certainly a step up from “stickler,” “pedant,” or “grammar Nazi.”

  *2  This would have been the perfect place for a snickering reference to Brooklyn hipsters, but snickering references to Brooklyn hipsters are trite and tired, so I refrain. By the way, the rhetorical trick of referring to something by denying that you’re referring to it is called “apophasis.”

  *3  Speaking out of the other side of my face, I might also argue that if you’re not making up words every now and then, you’re not doing your job. “Nouning,” by the bye, is not one of mine. It’s out there already.

  *4  “Begs the question” has also taken on a part-time job to mean “evades the question,” but I confront that vastly less frequently.

  *5  I love “listicle.” If a coinage truly captures a concept for which no extant word will do, if it truly brings something fresh to the table, I say let it pull up a chair and make itself comfortable.

  *6  Washington’s dentures were made of ivory, metal, and teeth appropriated from animals and other humans; nah, it didn’t; and (a) they weren’t witches, and (b) they were hanged.

  *7  “Regift,” on the other hand, is a gorgeous coinage because it does something no other word can properly do.

  *8  “Hoity-toity” and “fancy-shmancy” are examples of what’s called reduplication, if that’s a thing you’d like to know. See also, among many others, “easy-peasy,” “knickknack,” and “boogie-woogie.”

  *9  In the 2013 film Philomena, Judi Dench, as the heroine I will attempt to neutrally describe as being of the working classes, does at one point refer to the aristocratic people she’s reading about in a romance novel as “the hoi polloi.” Possibly, I suppose, that’s an error on the part of the screenwriter; I prefer to think that it’s a deft and expressive bit of characterization.

  *10  I have now officially turned into my mother.

  *11  A word that means its own opposite is a contronym, though the term “Janus word”—you remember two-faced Janus, looking ahead and behind at the same time, yes?—is also applied, and it packs a thrill. “Sanction” (to allow and to penalize) and “cleave” (to hold fast and to cut up) are classic Janus words. And though context will easily indicate for these two which meaning is being used, I wouldn’t say the same re “nonplussed,” so let’s hold on to just the one meaning, OK?

  *12  My editor wants me to tell you here never to use the words “yummy,” “panties,” or “guac.” Mission accomplished.

  SPELLCHECK IS A MARVELOUS INVENTION, but it can’t stop you from using the wrong word when the wrong word you’ve used is a word (but the wrong word). A great deal of copyediting entails catching these sorts of errors, which I assure you even the best writers commit.

  A LOT/ALLOT, ALLOTTED, ALLOTTING

  A lot of something is a great deal of it.

  To allot is to assign.

  ADVANCE/ADVANCED

  To advance is to move forward. The past tense of “advance” is “advanced.”

  An advance is a forward movement, as of an army, or a preliminary payment, as to writers who have not yet finished writing their books or children seeking to get ahead on their allowances.

  As well, “advance” means beforehand (as in “supplied in advance”).

  On the other hand, “advanced” refers to being ahead of the norm in progress or complexity, as an exceptionally clever student is advanced.

  The mistaken use of “advanced” for “advance” (not least in publishing, where bound galleys*1 are too commonly misreferred to as “advanced editions”) is constant and unfortunate.

  ADVERSE/AVERSE

  “Adverse” means unfavorable or harmful, as in “We are enduring adverse weather.”

  “Averse” means opposed to, repulsed by, or antipathetic toward, as in “I am averse to olives and capers.”

  AFFECT/EFFECT

  The traditional snap differentiation between “affect” and “effect” is that “affect” is a verb (“This martini is so watery, it doesn’t affect me at all”) and “effect” is a noun (“This martini is so watery, it has no effect on me at all”). Which is true as far as it goes. But only that far.

  Because “affect” is also a noun: “a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion.” One may speak, for instance, of a psychiatrist’s commenting on a traumatized patient’s affect.

  And “effect” is also a verb, as in “to effect change”—that is, to cause change to happen.

  Other uses of these words and their variants—as an affected person affects a posh accent; one’s personal effects (the things you’re carrying around on your person); “in effect” in the sense of “virtually”—seem to cause less confusion.

  AID/AIDE

  To aid is to help.

  An aide is an assistant.

  AISLE/ISLE

  This is a relatively new mix-up, at least so far as I’ve witnessed it, so let’s put a brisk stop to it.

  Aisles are the passages between seating areas in theaters and houses of worship and airplanes, and between display shelves of groceries in supermarkets.

  Isles are islands (usually small ones).

  ALL RIGHT/ALRIGHT

  Gertrude Stein made bemusing (or amusing, if you find Stein amusing) use of “alright” in her 1931 book How to Write:

  A sentence is alright but a number of sentences make a paragraph and that is not alright.

  As well, Pete Townshend wrote a song for the Who called “The Kids Are Alright.”*2

  These and other uses notwithstanding—and quite possibly you don’t want to write like Gertr
ude Stein*3—“alright” is objected to, by some, as slovenly, and its appearance in print remains rare relative to that of “all right.” That said, that I’m regularly asked my opinion of the acceptableness or un- of “alright” suggests to me that it’s making inroads, like it or not. I continue to wrinkle my nose at the sight of it, perhaps because I can’t see that it has a worthwhile enough distinction from “all right” to justify its existence, as, say, “altogether” and “already” are distinctly distinct from “all together” and “all ready.” You may feel otherwise.*4

  ALLUDE/ALLUSION/ALLUSIVE/ELUDE/ELUSIVE

  To allude is to refer obliquely, to hint at, as one alludes to a painful subject rather than discussing it explicitly.