A short list of linguistic pet peeves, and then [yada yada yada, ed.]

From my extremely smart but frustrating neighbour’s son:
pre-heat:  you cannot heat something before you heat it.

From my extremely smart and precise son:
coin wash: you are not laundering your money.

From Flanders and Swann:
fork-lift: what do you need a great big bloody thing like that to lift forks with?

And speaking of ending a sentence with a preposition, a thing up with which an English teacher will not put, one that drives me nuts is the loss of fewer to its pal, less.

Less money, fewer coins is my cheerful mnemonic for that one.  Of course there are the occasional exceptions, but the fewer the better.  Sometimes less isn’t more, it’s just a missed opportunity to use fewer.

Why, I hear you crying [you think that is why they are crying, ed.?] does it matter in the least if the meaning is clear?  Less coins, fewer money?  Because the meaning gets slightly muddled.

Dictionaries lived in our dining-room growing up, with the Compact Oxford, and its all important magnifying glass, settling many disputes, and a 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica settling the rest.  An early internet, as it were, without so much inter, or even net for that matter.  My dad was a particular stickler for the right word, causing me many anxious moments by penning ‘awk’ over a sentence that I knew was ‘awk’ – that was why I wanted help, for Tyr’s sake!  I lucked out and got the dictionary, pictured here in all its actual glory.  But the magnifying glass gets more use than the pages, in this wired world.

The Britannica crumbled and would have been but an invitation to Hoarders to come and film live on location had I been fool enough to try to get my sticky fingers on it.

Well don’t knock me over with a tribble when it turns out that recent studies have found depth of vocabulary, followed by breadth of vocabulary, correspond highly with high test scores and academic success.  And getting into Saturday Morning School, for which I am still ambivalent.  Yes, to rocket class, no to pretending to be an acorn growing into a mighty oak.  But they never said that was the prize for doing well on the innocent test we were handed in Grade 5, which to this day doesn’t exactly get my goat, but sure gets him a little itchy.  [Stop your bitter rant and get back to using your words properly.  This is getting a little ‘awk’, ed.]

As I was saying, aren’t those tests designed to look for just those things?  I don’t know the word hirsute from conversational use, let me tell you.  While it may have redundantly been used to describe a barbarian in a deeply wooly history book, it was practicing for the Graduate Record Exams that stuck it forever in the cranium of this admittedly somewhat hirsute girl.

The podcast in which I heard this tautological but nonetheless interesting information was of course on Econtalk.  I am going to link to it, but am hesitating because the interviewee has an incredibly irritating, positive attitude, where one is afraid he might clap his hands impetuously if it were not luckily mere audio.  The subject which was so gee, golly, gosh, interesting was the obvious importance of practice for so many things, but how it was neglected in teaching even though it was highly effective at making better teachers, in a simperingly positive environment, where everyone good seeks criticism and takes it well because they want to always become a better person.  Just like me.

Doug Lemov on Teaching

One of the word distinctions they mention is imitate vs mimic.  And the interviewee got mad about synonyms teaching that words mean the same thing – when they don’t – that’s why there are two of them, a valid if eccentric point.  I feel the same way about the importance of grammar and syntax.  Maybe it is mostly a pedantic joy, but a good idea ain’t [I am hoping to revive this excellent contraction] no good if you can’t express it, and it is likewise tricky to have a good idea if you don’t have ways to think of it.  A chicken and egg problem, but we live in a chicken and egg world.

Having had to explain grammar [had to, ed.?] well, for the benefit of my captive offspring during their pre-programming phase, I boiled it all down to this one sentence, which I have been determined to bore you with for some time:

The boy hit the ball with the bat to the fielder’s dog.

It has it all, much like the lazy brown fox, who jumped quickly over the neighbour’s fence.  A subject, hence the nominative, the boy.  An object, hence the objective, the ball.  An ablative of means, with the bat.  Okay, that one is unfair except to the hard core latin rememberers, but a terrible thing to have lost.  Me gladio vuleravit – he wounded me with a sword – a useful modern phrase n’est-çe pas?  Then the genitive with the fielder owning the dative dog.  Well it has almost everything but an intransitive verb, which I am sure was really bothering you.

I can hear my editor in my mind saying, speaking of prepositions, why don’t you just get it over with, to end a sentence with two of them!  And so I shall, it being the fewest I could do.