"The Angry Grammarian: A New Musical"
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For the past five years or so, Jeffrey Barg has been writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer called "The Angry Grammarian". The last one appeared on February 23 of this year, and Barg moved his peeves to Substack. At about the same time, his musical rom-com premiered at Theatre Exile in Philadelphia.
There's some coverage in an article by Jane Von Bergen, "Commas, syntax and usage star in 'The Angry Grammarian: A New Musical'", Billy Penn 3/5/2024:
Are you eager to read this story?
It’s about “The Angry Grammarian: A New Musical” a world premiere musical rom-com on grammar opening soon in Philadelphia.
If eager, perhaps it’s because you’ve always loved a good song about commas or have received a small reading bribe from writer Jane M. Von Bergen.
Or, maybe you are anxious to read this story.
Yes, you are going to read, but you are worried the mention of an Oxford comma will be triggering, you loathe musicals, and you often find Von Bergen’s humor a little nauseating.
Jeffrey Barg, both “The Angry Grammarian” playwright and Philadelphia Inquirer Angry Grammarian columnist, maintains a long list of crimes against language – and these days, the misuse of eager versus anxious is right near the top.
“I’m eager to correct it – not anxious to correct it,” he said.
Barg is probably both eager and anxious to see how audiences react to the play he wrote with Jersey theater artist David Lee White, who teaches advanced improvisation, theater history and dramatic analysis at Drexel University.
Performed by the Pier Players Theatre Co. at Theatre Exile March 7-16, “Angry Grammarian” charts the romance of two language fans who fall in love over a shared passion for grammar and punctuation.
So you've lost your chance to see the production — I didn't see it either — but you can experience a number of the songs on Jeffrey Barg's YouTube channel.
But the eager/anxious case featured in Jane Von Bergen's review is a classic example of ignorant peeving, rather than a "crime against language". The OED's entry for anxious includes sense 3, glossed as "Having a strong desire for something, to do something, or that something should happen; keen, eager, greatly concerned", with citations back to 1570.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 22, 2024 @ 10:07 am
Dr. Johnson in his dictionary has, as sense 3 of "anxious": "Careful, as of a thing of great importance." Which is maybe not quite eager/desirous but at least gets away from the negative emotional valence Barg's false dichotomy presupposes as inherent in the word.
JimG said,
November 22, 2024 @ 10:35 am
Thanks for pulling my chain this morning; I'm pleased, perhaps even eager, to take this as an opportunity to vent about people who don't take care in using words.
Crossword constructors and people hired to edit crossword puzzles may have firm grips on the wheel without paying attention to the road. An example might be " soupçons" characterized as measures used in cooking recipes, where a plural form is logically unlikely because adding multiple "suspicions" of a flavoring creates a definite taste.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 22, 2024 @ 10:46 am
Here's a sentence from a 1609 letter back to the Doge from the Venetian ambassador to England, although the English translation may be 19th-century: "He [i.e. King James I] said that he was much more anxious to please your Serenity than to please the Archduke whose Court was the asylum of all his worst enemies." That seems to clearly be the "eager" sense and not to connote any particular "anxiety" in the sense of nervousness or stress, but I wonder if there's also something euphemistic going on – using a word whose primary sense connotes that sort of nervousness being somehow akin to all that "i have the honour to remain your lordship's most obedient servant" stock rhetoric as used by people who had no actual intention of being obedient to the addressee, much less servile.
Cervantes said,
November 22, 2024 @ 11:47 am
I would say there is probably a nuanced difference in connotation between eager and anxious here. If I'm anxious to do something there's a suggestion that I'm afraid it might not happen after all, or not in time. If I'm eager to do it, the suggestion is that it's likely to happen and I just don't want to wait. I imagine the Venetian ambassador was unsure if he could please the Doge, certainly aware of possible consequences if he couldn't. Not being prescriptive here — you don't need to honor that in your own writing. But if I were writing carefully, I would find consider that nuance.
PeterB said,
November 22, 2024 @ 1:13 pm
Literate twenty-first century speakers do indeed distinguish between 'eager' and 'anxious'. But this is, ironically, a descriptionist argument, as the OED (and the persistence of set expressions like 'anxious to please') confirms.
Perhaps a genuine prescriptivist would regard the modern usage as a corruption, arising from a confusion of 'anxious' with 'anxiety'?
Roscoe said,
November 22, 2024 @ 2:21 pm
@JimG: What if each of the soupçons were added to a different dish?