I don't want English, American or British, to be a "dead" language, frozen in time and form. The French have an Academy to tell them how to speak and what words are approved. We don't need that. I'm all for newly invented words, and I don't complain (much) about turning nouns into verbs. I Google. It takes too long to say "I used a search engine to find..."
But some stuff still grates in the ears of an Ancien. Like "graduate high school." My kids say it. Even our Columbia and Harvard-educated President, and Princeton-educated First Lady, say it. (It's graduate from high school, people!) If you lose the "from," you did something to your high school; you turned graduate into a verb.
One knows his language goose is cooked when the error shows up in TV commercials. In one, a woman with yellow teeth says she got them whitened because she "doesn't want my daughter embarrassed of me." (It's by me.) Prepositions are clearly an endangered species: they're disappearing or switching places faster than I can keep up.
Now the proper use of plurals is under attack. Xerox informs us on TV that they can help us with our "accounts payables." It's accounts payable, people! The plural form follows the verb, not the subject: you pay your accounts, you can't pays them. Yet. Unless you "pays your money and takes your choice."
Ranting against a usage becoming customary is futile. But it makes me feel better. "Graduate high school" still grates on my ear like fingernails on a blackboard. Like "embarrassed of me" and "accounts payables."
2 comments:
As an ex-English teacher and self-admitted anal retentive, I'm on board. Part of what education is supposed to accomplish is to provide a firm foundation for solid life achievement and communication with others around you, theoretically, following the same basic set of rules. Language is a foundation building block, and structured with a correctness that is, alas, boring in class lectures. Lost quickly to colloquial slang, it is shortened, phrased, chopped, acronym'd to levels that shame our evolution. Ain't that a diss on us all us dudes??
"Ah, we few, we merry band of clarity and usage devotees..." We goeth the way of the dinosaurs. And (to mix metaphors) not with a bang, but with our own whimpers.
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