One extremely common written mistake is using 'loose', meaning slack or free, instead of 'lose' which means fail or 'not win'. More often than not the misuse is just that, misuse as opposed to a typographical error. A more complicated example is the word 'decimated'. Decimated means 'reduced by one tenth'. Mathematically, this means you would have 90% of what you started with after it has been 'decimated'. When a person 'tithes' to the church (by definition that means giving one tenth of one's wealth/income) their available funds have been decimated. It is almost never used in this context anymore but it is very frequently used nonetheless. Instead, people use it to imply 'almost completely eliminated', or 'nearly wiped out'. It's just plain wrong, but so few people know what it really means that the misuse goes on unchecked and no one ever gets corrected or educated. Eventually, the dictionary will reflect the misuse and the original meaning will be lost. They tell me this is called 'progress' or 'evolution'. Garbage is what it is and I don't like it. Stupidity and/or ignorance should never be chosen over knowledge and yet it is. is it any wonder we have so much hatred in our world when ignorance is rewarded and intelligence is shunned? (Perhaps it is coincidence that the word tithe itself has almost lost its original meaning in favour of meaning any charitable donation of any size or ratio. Perhaps not.)
Given that this is a pet peeve of mine you can just imagine how close to wit's end I was during the Presidency of George W. Bush. He absolutely butchered the English language. He wouldn't merely misuse words, he would invent new ones when he lacked for the appropriate word. There are dozens of 'Bushisms' and I won't dignify any of them by repeating them.
To this day 'scaremonger' drives me crazy! Yes, its first recorded use was in 1888 but had generally fallen into disuse in favour of the newer term (first used in 1939) 'fearmonger'. Why is fearmonger the better word? 'Fear' is an emotion that can be spread. To monger is to sell or spread. 'Scare' is not an emotion. It is used as both a verb (to startle) and a noun (as in "you really put a scare into him"). In neither case does it imply something that can be spread. See my point?
To give you an idea of how screwed up this is, now that a President has used the word 'scaremonger' it is back in vogue even though it is an inferior word. What's worse is the fact that my spellchecker accepts scaremonger and flags fearmonger as a misspelling! That really shows how powerful a cultural icon the President of the United States of America is, even when they aren't the sharpest tool in the shed.
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin managed to utter a few Bushisms of her own during the 2008 Presidential Election campaign season. In at least one case, her word was a meld of two perfectly good words (repudiate and refute) creating a new, non-English word (refudiate). Some linguists and lexicography experts (I'm looking at you New Oxford American Dictionary!) decided that neither of the words she melded actually suited the context of her sentence and decided that her invention should be a new word to fill the 'void'. The fact that the 'void' could be filled with the accepted word 'reject' is apparently not relevant, we need a new word! So, even being a candidate for the Vice Presidency gives you enormous power over a language used by billions, and perhaps by trillions more in year to come.
If anyone else had used Bush's or Palin's non-words publicly they would have been derided endlessly and that would be the end of things. Instead, we are stuck with their legacy while perfectly good words fall to the wayside simply because too many people couldn't be bothered to use them correctly.
Sometimes misuse occurs due to a person trying to sound smarter than they really are, and ending up sounding stupid instead. They use vocabulary that they haven't yet mastered, thinking their word means one thing when it actually means quite another. So, instead of sounding smart they sound pretentious at best and stupid or ignorant at worst.
I get particularly irate when misuse is perpetrated by people who have been placed in positions of linguistic authority. That means the media, particularly TV & radio reporters and anchors but includes print reporters and columnists too. Their words reach millions of readers/listeners and let's face it, these days people choose to learn from the media more than from books. So, an 'innocent' misuse ends up being echoed by the masses, most never knowing that they are mangling English.
[Tangent time!]
I get even more upset when they propagate misinformation which they do much more frequently then you would imagine. Discussions around global warming are an extremely common source of misinformation. Members of the media will often utter a throwaway like "We got clobbered with a ton of snow this weekend. So much for that global warming theory!" I've heard and seen well-respected weathermen do this!
If they had bothered to educate themselves in the slightest about 'that global warming theory' a.k.a. climate change, they would discover that it predicts rotten winter weather including cold snaps and snowstorms! Actually, it predicts more bad weather of all kinds, so the event that caused the pundit to dismiss global warming offhand actually helps prove that it is real!
Why does the theory predict bad weather? When you add heat to any system, like Earth's atmosphere, its behaviour becomes more erratic/chaotic. Consider a pot of water. When you put it on the stove it is completely still. Leave it on a hot element for a while and bubbles begin forming at the bottom of the water (on the surface of the pot) and eventually start floating to the surface. Finally, after sufficient heat is added, the water boils and as a result it roils, churns and gives of steam due to that additional heat. That's what's happening to the atmosphere.
Global warming means there will be more frequent and more intense extremes in additional to the overall average increase in temperature. What are does more frequent and more intense extremes mean in terms of weather? It means more frequent and intense damaging wind events (up to and including tornadoes), droughts, storms that bring heavy precipitation (which includes the snowstorms alluded to above as well as hurricanes and other cyclonic storms), lightning, wildfires, heat waves and cold snaps. These effects would also cause famines due to drought and disease due to standing, stagnant water resulting from flooding after heavy rains. There will also be a loss of land as the sea level rises due to reduction or elimination of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic zones. Changes in precipitation, temperature and wind will render some farmland unusable and others to have to change crops to suit the new conditions. The new areas that receive the weather we used to expect in the most productive farm areas may not have sufficient quality soil for effective farming. The Canadian Shield is an example of land that might gain an ideal farming climate but is too rocky to be used efficiently for crops.
So, in general, were in for a wild and bumpy ride, particularly since the prevailing attitude is to do nothing while the process simply accelerates due to ever increasing consumption and emissions from the now 7 billion and counting souls crushing Earth's biosphere.
[end tangent]
Anyway, back to language use. I've recently come across a classic example of misuse of language while listening to ads on the radio. There is a current radio spot airing for Toronto Pearson's (referring to Toronto's Lester B. Pearson International Airport) Value Park Garage. It includes the following line spoken by someone who is lamenting how long it takes for a shuttle to arrive to take them to the airport:
"Some say waiting for it feels like many moons, even a fortnight!"
The response to this is "you talk funny", which is entirely fair in this case. Not only is the language archaic, it doesn't make sense! Translated to modern English the sentence reads:
"Some say waiting for it feels like many months, even two weeks!"
There's one problem with that statement. If it takes months, of course it also takes fourteen days! That's a logical/mathematical guarantee! It's a complete given, because two weeks is shorter than many months! To make any sense the archaic references to time need to be reversed.
How the advertising agency and the advertised company failed to notice this is beyond me. I find it ludicrous that this kind of mistake makes it to the airwaves. The only explanation I can find is that one or more ad execs thought it would be cute to include archaic, somewhat poetic English and didn't bother to fact check the meanings of the terms used. In other words, they thought they were smarter than they actually are.
This is grossly unprofessional! If I was the owner of Toronto Pearson's Value Park Garage I would be livid that these slacking buffoons made my company look bad. If I was the boss of those responsible for this mistake I would rake them over the coals. Depending on what their previous performance looked like as well as a few other issues, I might even feel forced to let somebody go!
The moral of the story is that none of us are nearly as smart as we think we are, unless of course you are the embodiment of humility and I can't think of anyone short of the Dalai Lama that might fit that bill. Being humble is often discussed but seldom practiced. Maybe I'll blog about that someday, but not today.
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