The Weekly Screed (#764)

Stop saying that!
by David Benjamin

“Literally for Figuratively. ‘The stream was literally alive with fish.’ ‘His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet.’ It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.”
     — Ambrose Bierce, from Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults

MADISON, Wis. —  Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in April’s issue of The Atlantic, “The Obama Doctrine,” is probably the most important foreign-policy article written during this (or maybe any) presidential administration. However, several times in the midst of Goldberg’s lucid analysis, he uses the word “reticent” — which means “habitually silent or uncommunicative” — when he means “reluctant” or “hesitant.” With each iteration of this near-miss, I quietly cursed Goldberg’s copy editor.

Goldberg’s error, however, was the last (not “penultimate,” which — honest to God, people! — does not mean “super-, hyper- or mega-ultimate”) straw. I feel driven to bellyache because our most august organs of journalism are solecizing more and more often. Not a month ago, the New York Times’ China correspondent Chris Buckley (not to be confused with novelist Christopher Buckley, son of William F.) referred to “the giddy exultation of President Xi Jinping in state-run media.” The word he wanted, but did not find, was “exaltation.”

Frequently, the Times, and other supposed defenders of proper English usage, will publish a sentence — overlooked by editors whose only job is to look — in which a reporter writes “mirror” when he or she means “echo,” “discount” instead of “disregard,” “everyday” instead of “ordinary,” “decimate” — which means to reduce by one-tenth — instead of “devastate.”

F’rinstance, when an F3 tornado blows through Coon Hollow, Oklahoma, leveling every house, farm building and double-wide, turning Main Street into rubble and flinging entire herds of livestock into the next county, Coon Hollow is not shrunk by ten percent. It ain’t “decimated.” It’s gone. “Devastated” is both correct and subtle.

A note to Times copy editors: Strive, strove, striven. Plead, pled, pled. Hear my plea, please! He pled, not “pleaded,” guilty. And, shine, shone, shone. “Shined” is only correct when it applies to shoes and silver. The sun shone down on my old Kentucky home.

Of course, as linguistically slovenly as our print media are (not “is”), the talking heads of TV offend far more often and egregiously. Given the opportunity, they might describe their own inaccuracy as “phenomenal.” But they would be wrong. Their blunders are commonplace. Sportscasters, groping constantly for the superlatives that populate their patter, shout “phenomenal” when they mean “excellent” or “heroic.” A “phenomenon” is a thing exceptional and rare but not necessarily good. That F3 tornado in Coon Hollow is phenomenal but hardly as welcome as a grand-slam homer.

In a similar onset of hyperbole, your sportscaster will roar, “Unbelievable!” or “Incredible!” after, say, a 20-yard touchdown pass or a bunker-to-cup chip shot. Trouble is, this marvel is believable and demonstrably credible because ten million TV viewers just saw it happen, with their own lying eyes.

When pressbox hysterics proclaim disbelief, they mean “remarkable” or “extraordinary.” But are even these terms accurate? Excellent athletes perform spectacularly so often that their exceptions tend to be the rule. A scrupulous reporter would curb his or her enthusiasm to the point where he or she would describe a routine between-the-legs windmill slam-dunk as “pretty darn good or “definitely above average.” (See Ray Scott.)

Or, ideally, when a network shill sees an athlete do something wonderful, couldn’t he or she just call it wonderful and shut up afterward (not “afterwards”), leaving the audience to “wonder” how the athlete made that difficult maneuver look so easy? Wouldn’t reticence be more eloquent?

And when the game’s over and the sideline reporter sticks a mike in the star’s kisser, how gratifying would it be to hear a question that doesn’t begin with “how” followed by an adjective?

“Bubba, how proud are you that blah blah blah…?”

“Shooter, how grateful are you that Coach trusted you to yada yada yada…?”

And how surprised would we all be if the jock on the block, asked to trash his coach, lament his paltry salary or explain his blood-alcohol level, did not wrap up the interview by saying “It is what it is”?

When, please, will Erin Andrews or Lisa Salters summon up the curiosity to keep the camera rolling and ask, “What is what what is, Bruiser?”

In 1909, Ambrose Bierce published a “blacklist” of linguistic and grammatical offenses committed by the reporters, editors and orators of his time. Some of those sins have remained offensive. Some have wormed their way into the vernacular — “preparedness” instead of “readiness.” Others remain unspeakable. Meanwhile, new blacklist aspirants (not “candidates” — see Bierce) emerge every day.  An honest, open speaker, for example, is not “forthcoming” — which means he or she might arrive tomorrow. The right word here — although forgotten — is “forthright.” An action that’s “reactive” is not “reactionary.” The latter is a political term that begins with “r” (for “Republican”) and ends with “y” (for “yahoo” — see Swift).

“Skill set,” by the ways means “skills.” A “track record” is a “record,” unless there are jockeys and drivers involved. You can have one aria and a single cafeteria but not one, lonesome “criteria.”

“Fraught,” for most of my life, has meant “loaded,” “freighted,” “filled.” Something fraught had to be fraught with something — “fraught with hardship,” “fraught with tension,” “fraught with anxiety.” Lately, the Times uses “fraught” untethered, to mean “anxious” or “tense.” I suspect that this is already the norm, a development that curiously parallels the migration of “taihen” (“very, too, greatly, awfully, extremely, remarkably”) from adverb to adjective in Japanese.

I’m still hoping, however, to see “effective” fight back against the ugly  “impactful.” I’d love to hear someone say, “I have too much to do” instead of “too much on my plate.” I wonder why the future tense now — always — requires the speaker to append the phrase, “going forward.” I mean, where else? I’d like to launch every “perfect storm” metaphorist into The Atlantic in a leaky fishing boat. I yearn for the “bottom line” to bottom out and to reach, at last, the end of the day for “at the end of the day.”

And I wonder. When did a real or imminent danger become an “existential threat”? Whenever I hear his sesquipedalian couplet, a chill runs down my spine and I look around fearfully for a pair of armed philosophers named Vladimir and Estragon.