Polly Campbell: Time to reign in the urge to ‘correct’ word usage?

I try not to be judgmental when it’s not called for. I think of that effort as a life journey, something that comes eventually with age.

I may never be old enough. 

Not when it comes to judging people who use words wrong. People “pouring” over books. People who announce things without further “adieu.” Who think that one thing is, for all “intensive” purposes, just like another thing. Who groove to the “Almond Brothers” or “Holland Oates.”

I’m not the only one. I was just scrolling through a subreddit about misused language where people eagerly shared examples, some that they said “make me want to stab my own head off.” Or “give me the puce rage,” “makes me want to stick scissors in my eyes,” “make me irrationally angry.” 

It’s hard to understand exactly why people feel so strongly to threaten self-harm over it, but I get it. Sometimes it’s because the mess-up makes no sense at all. “I could care less” literally means the opposite of what the speaker is trying to say.

I don’t correct in public, because no one likes a grammar narc. (Also, I have made enough mistakes in print in my time to not throw stones.) Fortunately, my husband is a connoisseur of dumb language usage. I just now ran downstairs to tell him about an internet list smugly describing why it’s “champ at the bit,” not “chomp at the bit,” and explaining that, by the way, a bit is used to pull on the “rein.”

This judgmental me is the result of a lifetime of reading every kind of writing and a career as an AP Stylebook-following professional writer. But I was also a linguistics major in college – for a semester, until I was undone by the incomprehensibility of transformational grammar. 

I came away with the less prescriptive basic principles of linguistics: That all languages are equally capable of conveying any thought. That language cannot be pinned down to one “correct” version. (Imagine how dull English would be if we tried to keep out Black English or computer jargon or millennial slang.) That speakers decide over time what words mean and how expressions go. I try to keep that understanding in control of my automatic reactions.

I remember coming home at Christmas and having a big fight with my father (who knew the roots and exact meaning of almost every word in English) over the meaning of the word “moot.” He contended it should only be used to mean “debatable” while I said that if people used it to mean “not worth debating,” that’s what it means. (At least we agreed it wasn’t “a mute point.”) 

Words morph all the time, many to conform to the way it sounds. “Toothsome” originally meant delicious, but it’s pretty obvious why it now means “textured” or “al dente,” though it’s going to take me a while to get there. “Buxom” meant pretty but became “busty.” I can’t quite blame the girl I saw on YouTube saying she’d make a good Viking because she was “good at husbandry.” “I take really good care of my husband,” she explained. 

So many of our antique idiomatic expressions are also due for some morphing. Most of them are about farming. No wonder people get them wrong! The first time something was described as “chock-full” was the 15th century. So why shouldn’t it be “chalk-full?” It doesn’t really make sense, but neither does chock-full. And the original “not by a long chalk” seems meaningless, while the mistake that replaces it, “not by a long shot” just seems more satisfactory.

 One that drives me nuts, but you could say demonstrates the wisdom of crowds, is “free reign,” instead of the original “free rein.” They mean something similar – to let someone do what they want. Why should we keep using a construction from the days when we got around by horse-drawn carriages? 

“Survival of the fists” isn’t what Darwin was actually talking about, but it does give a kind of graphic sense of the law of the jungle, or should I say the “doggy dog” world (which is a lot cuter than the one where they eat each other). The image of having “a new leash on life” is a lot more colorful than an old lease. And “prostrate cancer” is positively poetic.

Others really are just hilarious, like “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it“ and “I don’t have a horse in this fight.”

I do think people should know the words and expressions of their profession: U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., should have known it’s not “Marshall Law,” all politicians should know how to pronounce “nuclear,” and restaurant servers should know it’s not “expresso.” Anyone who writes about food should know the difference between palate, palette and pallet (wrong 80% of the time, though I understand confusing the first two). 

And anyone who takes phone messages should know that “out of pocket” does not mean “out of the office.” Though it will eventually.

Polly Campbell covered restaurants and food for the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1996 until 2020. She lives in Pleasant Ridge with her husband, and since retiring does a lot of reading, cooking and gardening, if that’s what you call pulling weeds. 

She writes monthly on a variety of topics, and she welcomes your feedback and column suggestions at
editor (at) moversmakers.org.

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