Along the same line, not too long ago there was a post on
Facebook about grammatical errors and one commenter said he gets furious when
someone puts two spaces after a sentence (something new to me when I went back
to editing a few years ago). Furious, mind you, over an extra space. There's a
fellow headed for a heart attack before he's 40.
After a period of working with those hard and fast grammar
and style rules, I learned that lesson. Editing writers from all over
Alaska, one of whom actually submitted a story written in crayon on a brown paper grocery bag (remember those?) I learned to hold back on judgments. Many
of those writers knew very little about grammar, spelling, syntax or anything
else. But what they could do was tell a good story. To edit them I shut off my
elitist attitude toward editing and did what I could to make those stories presentable
without destroying the writer's voice. I had learned to adjust, fit the rules
to the situation, not fit the situation to the rules.
Then, when I first joined Facebook I came across a large
number of posts correcting people's grammar and spelling. I even commented in a
time or two, unable to resist. But I should have known, in my years as an editor
I had learned to leave that habit at the office. Friends and family do not appreciate
you constantly correcting them and pretty soon you find you have no one to talk
with. Also it seemed to be a sign of a newcomer to the social media to correct
those errors or post memes about grammar. After a while it wears thin and then you go
on to cute cats or Hillbilly Hangout.
A simple misspelling or a grammatical mistake once in a
while became tolerable as long as the message came across all right. The only
exception comes when someone who is supposed to be a professional writer
consistently makes these mistakes that a comment might be apropos.
More often than those mistakes, though I have noticed those trending
words. A writer somewhere will employ a new term for something and before long
every writer across the country will be using the same term until it grates on the mind like
a loud bell between the ears.
One such fairly recent one is the word "roughly,"
used to mean about or approximately. Once a story is enough. Once a day is already too much, and
when it gets into every story in every publication throughout the country it has
lost all of its impact. That term started with one writer at the newspaper
where I worked and within a couple of weeks everyone was using it and only it
to express an approximation. Example: "The ship was roughly the length of
three football fields." And, answer this, why is "football
field" the distance measure most often used for lengths of more than 300
feet? Does the writer think the audience is so stupid 930 feet can't be
envisioned? Some writers will go to amazing lengths to use the football field
comparison. It's only a matter of time until space is measured in football
fields instead of light years.
There are others, among them this list of
"enough-already" terms:
The first two relate to each other.
"met up" It seems no one any more can write any
form of the verb "to meet" without the "up." Met up meet
up, meeting up with. Just "met" is fine.
"Back in …" Every announcer on television news and
sports now has to say "back in" and then some date in the past. Instead of "back in 1978"
just say "in 1978."
And here are some terms we have just had enough of (yes I
know about prepositions):
Anything 'gate.
Perfect storm – how often is that used to describe a
congestion of elements? I remember in the movie when the satellite weather
photo of the storm came on the screen saying way too loud "geesus."
It was one of those times my daughter dug her elbow into my ribs hard enough to
leave a bruise. That was a perfect storm. There are very few others,
particularly not when the term is extended to contexts like politics.
Boots on the ground – come on, once was enough, twice was
almost too much already, but about a million times later it has lost its punch.
Baby bump – good grief, enough!
Poop – this has become the acceptable word for human
excrement even in the most serious of contexts. Can't writers find anything less cute? There are several
options.
Arc – This is a fairly new one that refers to the area
influenced by an event. It was used for the Newton school shootings to describe
the general area where those victims lived.
Hitler;
Nazi;
dictator; Please, if the president were any of these things,
you would:
a) be in prison of dead just for saying any of those;
b) not be able to say them anyway because you would not have
free access to this Internet we have come to know and love.
Hero – enough said about that, overused. Heroes are actually
rare.
Amongst – this has been showing up more frequently. It is principally a British usage. "Among"
is the way Americans spell it. Like "grey" is British, "gray"
is American.
Admittedly this is a personal prejudice, but "bikers" ride motorcycles often in gangs. "Bicyclists" are those daredevils who challenge pickup trucks the size of houses for the right of way on slushy winter streets.
Admittedly this is a personal prejudice, but "bikers" ride motorcycles often in gangs. "Bicyclists" are those daredevils who challenge pickup trucks the size of houses for the right of way on slushy winter streets.
Newspapers have their own usage difficulties. Headline words
make up a group of those. Headline words are used when the correct, but longer
term won't fit in a headline, for example "heist" instead of "robbery"
or "prep" instead of "high school." They are last resorts
even in writing headlines, but when they show up in copy where there are fewer space restraints they are just hack words, jargon. Still they appear frequently. The TV show Castle had a great running gag on shortened jargon
words. A detective asked the writer, Castle, why writers always called the
criminals "perps" from perpetrators. Then for the rest of the episode every time they met, the
detectives tossed out another synonym for the word. It's what all writers
should do when they recognize trending words and cliches in their work. Look
for another term.
This is a subject that can go on and on to grueling extremes
and obviously this post isn't the last word or any sort of list of hard and
fast rules, and certainly not worth suffering a heart attack over. More like a
blood-letting on my part releasing some irritations that have been building
over the years. It will pass or a bigger and better list will show up some day.
No comments:
Post a Comment