Language Log

Anne Curzan, "What to do about 'impactful'?", Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/19/2013:

If I were asked to rate new words on a scale from 1-10 based on their aesthetic appeal (note: words’ aesthetic appeal in my opinion—this scale cannot possibly be objective), with 10 being the most appealing and 1 being the least, I would give impactful about a 3. In other words, I notice the word, and I don’t especially like it.

Now, let’s be clear: There is no particularly good reason for my displeasure with this word. There are plenty of similar adjectives in the language, formed by a noun + -ful to mean “full of or having a lot of [the noun]”: for example, playful, joyful, eventful. The adjective impactful is relatively new to the language, but that’s not a good reason for my distaste either—there are lots of other new words that I like (e.g., the wonderfully playful recombobulate). The meaning of impactful is a bit vague (for example, is the impact good or bad?), but the same critique could be made of well-accepted adjectives like influential. The word may sound business jargony to some, but the data no longer fully support this connotation, as I’ll get to.

There was a language-peeve Op-Ed piece in the NYT yesterday called "A crescendo of errors", written by a violist who hates the expression "reach a crescendo". In music, a crescendo is a gradual increase, but it's widespread in non-musical contexts to use it to mean "reach a very loud state" or something like that. "But here’s the thing: as God — along with Bach, Beethoven and Mozart — is my witness, you cannot “reach” a crescendo." (Well, of course, as many commenters noted, you can reach a crescendo in the sense of reaching the point where it begins.)

Comments were closed before I saw the piece; it got 144 comments. Many applauded the author, but what struck me was how many didn't, and instead made the point that is so often made here, that languages change, and that peeving by "purists" won't prevent change. That seems heartening.

Martyn Cornell:

Check out the comment from sportzzzgirl at the link below, “Strange development in language”, where she is complaining about the use of the verb “spell” to mean “to be relieved at their post”, which has been in the English language, as someone else quickly points out, since the 16th century … surely a record for the recency effect!

The original story is "EMT Stays on Phone With Stroke Victim For 8 Hours Trying to Find Her", Gawker 6/16/2013:

An FDNY EMT dispatcher stayed on the phone with a stroke victim for eight hours as rescuers tried to pinpoint where the distressed and slurring woman had fallen. […]

In a letter or recognition for her actions, Emergency Medical Dispatch Capt. Philip Weiss wrote that "throughout the entirety [Hilman-Payne] worked to keep the patient awake, she never lost her own composure and remained calm while attempting to elicit more information from the patient.”

Weiss continues that Hilman-Payne “remained on the phone with the patient for almost eight hours being spelled only briefly for reasons of personal necessity.”

Anna Staver, "Man threatens to blow up state building over misspelled sign: Suspect blames failure to detonate on misspellings in instructions", Stateman-Journal, 5/29/2013:

A man brought a pressure cooker he claimed was a bomb into the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission office and told employees he tried to blow up their sign because it was misspelled on Wednesday morning. […]

Leonard Burdek, 50, of Salem, told Chamberlain and the receptionist that he tried to blow up the agency’s outside sign, but the bomb didn’t work.

Allison Flood, "Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove", The Guardian 5/3/2013:

It was a blistering attack on Michael Gove for eroding educational standards and "dumbing down" teaching. But now the 100 academics who wrote an open letter in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum have had their own accuracy questioned. Their letter has been dubbed "simply illiterate" by the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards.

The professors, from universities including Nottingham Trent, Leeds Metropolitan, Oxford and Bristol, had warned that Gove's national curriculum proposal meant children would be forced to learn "mountains of detail" for English, maths and science without understanding it. But according to the Idler Academy Bad Grammar awards, they made a string of grammatical blunders including using adjectives as adverbs and mixing singulars with plurals.

In the comments section of the London (Ontario) Free Press, there was a frank exchange of views on the grammaticality of the headline "Man wandering in traffic arrested with gun" (3/20/2013). A small sample follows.

In a comment on Geoff Nunberg's "The data are" post, Jo wryly reminds us that the data-is-plural-dammit peevers need to consider their position on the word agenda. The OED's (historically) first sense of agenda is

1. With pl. concord. Things to be done, viewed collectively; matters of practice, as distinguished from belief or theory. Sometimes opposed to credenda. Obs.

with citations like this:

1860 M. F. Maury Physical Geogr. Sea (ed. 8) i. §67   But notwithstanding all that has been done..for human progress, there still remain many agenda. There is both room and need for further research.

Plural agenda is of course etymologically correct:

< classical Latin agenda (neuter plural) business, affairs, in post-classical Latin also divine office (4th cent.), legal proceedings (12th cent. in British sources), plural of agendum thing which is to be done (usually in plural), neuter gerundive of agere to do

Reader PS has written to alert us to an instructive drama unfolding at tv tropes, a wiki that is "a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". As of about two months ago,  "titular" became a forbidden word at tv tropes. The site's software now simply deletes all (new) attempted uses of that string of letters.  PS explains:

This is not a Scunthorpe problem with "tit."  Someone on the site (presumably site co-founder Fast Eddie) decided that "titular" is a synonym for "nominal" but not "eponymous."  (I wish I had a better citation than that, but the best link I can find says that the previous discussion about using "titular" was deleted.)

Kory Stamper at harm·less drudg·ery responds to a correspondent who is sincerely troubled by the illogic of irregardless ("No Logic in 'Etymological': A Response I Actually Sent",  10/24/2012):

English is a little bit like a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned light sockets. We put it in nice clothes and tell it to make friends, and it comes home covered in mud, with its underwear on its head and someone else’s socks on its feet. We ask it to clean up or to take out the garbage, and instead it hollers at us that we don’t run its life, man. Then it stomps off to its room to listen to The Smiths in the dark.

Everything we’ve done to and for English is for its own good, we tell it (angrily, as it slouches in its chair and writes “irregardless” all over itself in ballpoint pen). This is to help you grow into a language people will respect! Are you listening to me? Why aren’t you listening to me??

Like  well-adjusted children eventually do, English lives its own life. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like one of the Classical languages (I bet Latin doesn’t sneak German in through its bedroom window, does it?). We can threaten, cajole, wheedle, beg, yell, throw tantrums, and start learning French instead. But no matter what we do, we will never really be the boss of it. And that, frankly, is what makes it so beautiful.

Randall Munroe's latest xkcd strip:

From the After Deadline blog of Phil Corbett, style guru at the New York Times, comes this 1924 letter to the editor calling for a Congressional investigation into the imperiled state of the English subjunctive:

Reading Geoff Pullum's post about Harold E. Palmer's 1935 Gilbert & Sullivan adaptation, I wondered about the spelling of "vocal chords" in the passage

I wish to call attention to the tactics and the strategy
Exemplified in all the work produced by Dr. Chatterji,
To ascertain what happens at the back of people's pharynxes
And analyse the vocal chords in artificial larynxes.

The "vocal cords" are so named from the resemblance of the vocal ligaments to strings or cords, so I wondered whether the "vocal chords" spelling might be an antique eggcorn. The answer turns out to be "yes", but with a twist: cord and chord participated in a rare reciprocal swap.

Local Dallas newscaster said "where we're at" twice just now. Would a national newscaster get away with this? I consider it uneducated.

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) August 11, 2012

The entry for where . . . at in Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes that

The use of at following where was first noted in 1859 by Bartlett, who observed in his Dictionary of Americanisms that it was "often used superfluously in the South and West, as in the question 'Where is he at?'" Such usage first drew the attention of critics at about the turn of the century, and they have routinely prescribed against it since. Although fairly common in speech, this construction rarely occurred in writing until the 1960s, when the idiomatic phrases where it's at and where one is at came into widespread use by jazz and rock musicians, hippies, and others […]

These phrases continue to be used today, although they have some of the passé quality of old slang. They are most likely to occur when the language and attitudes of the 1960s and early 1970s are being deliverately evoked or mimicked. Other than in these phrases, at almost never occurs after where in writing from standard sources.

But in this case, I believe that the facts are against both Mr. Garner and the editors of MWDEU.