You know what phrase inexplicably pisses me off? To take something “to the next level.” What the hell does it even mean? It might refer to a relationship. Or business negotiations. Or anything, really. Can’t we find more precise and accurate ways of expressing things that are supposedly being taken to the next level? If a man and woman take their relationship “to the next level,” does that mean sex? Moving in together? Making it Facebook official? Getting engaged? (Which order are those things supposed to come in, anyway?) Why not just directly state which of those items are involved?
One problem I have with “next level” is the fact that it implies that progress in whatever field is being discussed is quantized and split into discrete steps. This may very well be the case in certain circumstances, but in many, it’s nonsense.
So please, don’t ever use this phrase again.
I’ve been doing a pretty good amount of reading lately. Mostly nonfiction, in a variety of genres: sports, science, philosophy, politics, and plenty of others. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I absolutely cannot stand endnotes.
Often a writer has things to say that don’t belong in the main text, but still need to be said. Sometimes they’re parenthetical asides; sometimes they’re citations or clarifications. There are two main ways to deal with these: make them either footnotes (placed at the bottom of the page) or endnotes (buried in the back of the book). Now, I don’t mind an endnote if it’s just going to be something along the lines of “ibid p. 347.” But if you’re going to tell me something even remotely interesting, why the hell should I have to flip a couple hundred pages to read it? Continue reading ‘endnotes’
The other day I was driving around town listening to WWNO. They were doing a special comparing Detroit’s public schools with the ones in New Orleans. Some guy was talking about the schools in New Orleans. Except that he was pronouncing New Orleans as “New Orleeeenz,” that hideous (yet all too common) mispronunciation that makes the natives cringe. I figured that this guy must be a clueless Michigander perpetrating offenses against our way of speaking. But guess who the guy turns out to be? Paul Vallas, a Chicago native but current resident of New Orleans as superintendent of the Recovery School District. You’re gonna come here and take taxpayer money to the tune of whatever the hell your salary is, and you can’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce the name of the city? Fuck you, Paul Vallas. It seems like you’re doing a decent job as far as I can tell, but you are now on my shitlist and you will remain firmly ensconced upon even if the students in the RSD magically become Einsteins overnight thanks to your leadership. How fucking hard is it to pronounce it correctly? Hell, there’s probably half a dozen different pronunciations you could get away with—basically, any of them except the ones that make the last syllable rhyme with “cleans.” Continue reading ‘the mispronunciation of “new orleans”’
I love words. They’re wonderful creatures. But some words repulse me. One of them is “whilst.” Just typing it makes me cringe. I don’t like it when British people use it; but it’s even worse when Americans use it in some attempt to be fancy or different or pretentious. Every time I see Americans use that word, I want to punch them in the face and then beat them repeatedly with a 6-iron. With the Brits, it’s not too big a deal; surely they’re brainwashed by their teachers into believing such a word is acceptable when it surely defies all rules of taste and decency. So they have an excuse, at least. Some online sources seem to suggest minor differences in meaning between “whilst” and “while” in some regions, but we have plenty of other words that have similar meanings without sounding like nails on a chalkboard.
So if you’re American, you have no excuse to use this word. Ever. I will hunt you down if you do. And if you’re British, I won’t hunt you down—trans-Atlantic airfare is on the pricey side—but you still shouldn’t use it.
Let’s suppose you’re somewhere you don’t want to be. You’re bored out of your mind. Are you disinterested? No! You’re uninterested. Those are two completely different words, but people have been horribly misusing “disinterested” to mean “uninterested.” This online dictionary entry includes a note from the American Heritage Dictionary, whose Usage Panel* highly disapproves of using “disinterested” to mean “uninterested.” However, that same note also notes that “disinterested” once meant “uninterested,” back in the 17th century; then it fell out of fashion, but came back in the 20th century. So we can’t just use history as a guide here, since history has done different things with this word at different times. Continue reading ‘the confusion of “disinterested” and “uninterested”’
I know what you’re saying: “Kevin, not another article about quotation marks!” (Okay, probably four people are saying, “Ooh, another article about quotation marks!” But they’re in the minority.) My topic today concerns those authors who have decided they’re too good to use quotation marks. They have to come up with some novel concept for quoted material, but that non-standard invention never works quite as well as the tried-and-true. Continue reading ‘authors who don’t use quotation marks’
I’ve been studying Latin for a really long time. So I’ve seen lots of people screw it up in various ways when they try to get cutesy and clever and insert Latin into their English sentences. One of the things people screw up all the time is forming the plurals of Latin nouns which have passed into English usage. There’s probably a dozen different rules for forming Latin plurals, but people will think everything just ends in i. Those people would be wrong. Continue reading ‘incorrect latin plurals’
Here’s another one for you punctuation maniacs out there. When you get to a closing quotation mark, a number of different rules govern whether certain punctuation marks (such as periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points) go inside or outside of that closing quote. In proper American usage, there are three different categories: Continue reading ‘people who don’t put commas and period inside closing quote marks’
As you probably know if you have half a brain, the English language is under constant assault from people who don’t have any clue what they’re doing. Often celebrities (actors, singers, sports stars, etc.) do most of the damage—they’re on TV all the time, they’re always talking, and many of them are complete and utter morons. And just about every time one of them accomplishes something, they say, “I’m humbled.” It’s the sort of thing that’s basically the opposite of what it should be, like when people say “I could care less” when they really mean “I couldn’t care less.” Continue reading ‘the misuse of the word “humbled”’
It seems like half of the apostrophes I see are used incorrectly. People get confused, I think, because they aren’t able to understand the difference between a plural and a possessive, and they get caught up in a tangle of s‘s and apostrophes. A plural means there’s more than one of something. In that case, you almost never use an apostrophe. The only exceptions, basically, are when you’re dealing with something that’s italicized (such as a book title, magazine title, non-English word, etc.), when you’re dealing with abbreviations that have periods in them, or in a few words or phrases where it’s become standard (“do’s and don’ts,” for example). Continue reading ‘misused apostrophes’