I am currently in the midst of crafting my senior capstone in English, so I’ve had writing on the brain. (That might also explain the absence of the Week in Viewpoints section last week).
With all that writing I’ve been doing, I decided to devote this week to stories and articles about the written word in all its sundry forms. First, we go to Inc.com, where Christina DesMarais lays out 43 different grammar mistakes that even the most wizened of wordsmiths is wont to make from time to time. Some of these are fairly obvious: “irregardless” is not a word, do not use “I” as the last word or “me” as the first word in a sentence, it’s “prostate” cancer not “prostrate” cancer. Others are ones I found myself guilty of on a regular basis: “Must of, should of, would of, and could of” instead of “Must have, should have, would have, and could have,” “persay” or “per say” instead of the correct Latin phrase “per se” meaning “in itself,” using the phrase “hot water heater” (it’s redundant, it should just be “water heater”), and giving someone “free reign” instead of the proper phrase “free rein” as in the reins of a horse.
It may seem like pedantry, but it’s always good to know how to properly use common words and phrases, especially if they come up in the context of academic writing. Speaking of academic writing, there’s probably one reference book you haven’t been using that maybe you should: the thesaurus. B.D. McClay at The Outline writes about how “The Thesaurus is Good, Valuable, Commendable, Superb Actually.”
As McClay says, the thesaurus sometimes gets a bad rap:
As reference books go, the thesaurus, these days, is one step up in respectability from the rhyming dictionary. To use one is to betray something embarrassing about yourself. To be accused of using one is to be accused both of pretentiousness and of using words whose meaning you don’t really know. (For instance: I originally wrote “accused of malapropism” in that previous sentence, but then checked the dictionary and discovered this refers to mistakes based on sound.) One goes to the thesaurus to find, as they say, a “ten-dollar word.”
But really the fault is in ourselves. Anti-thesaurus snobbery and an allergy to trying new words threatens to stifle the creative potential of the English language:
But the alternate problem is that people are too afraid to test new words — even words that are correct, but obscure — because they are afraid of seeming foolish and they either stay within the bounds of a safe vocabulary or (if they are a certain business-managerial type) cope by inventing hideous new words. Fear of the thesaurus has unleashed horrors a Chthonic god could only dream of, like synergy and incentivize.
This seems to me to be a worse problem, not only because people do learn by making mistakes, but because the sphere of “correct,” accessible English will only get smaller and smaller. Such a state of affairs will not correct language slippage, but it will make English much more boring. One reason people are drawn to the English language writing of people whose first language isn’t English, like Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, is because their approach to the language can feel more excited about its potentials than that of people who have been living inside English all their life.
To be clear: I am not somebody who is particularly patient about English errors. I still insist that “begs the question” should not ever be used in place of “raising the question.” I have very little time for ill-conceived metaphors. But I don’t blame the thesaurus. I blame not thinking about what you’re saying, which you can’t reasonably expect any reference guide to prevent. At least somebody who looks up a word in a thesaurus is putting a little work in.
We English language speakers are truly blessed to have a million print resources, thesauruses and all, to reference. If you speak Urdu, a language spoken in Pakistan and neighboring parts of India, you don’t have that luxury and, what’s more, you didn’t even have good typefaces for your language until well into the 20th century.
That’s because Urdu uses a special kind of script. While most languages like Urdu have adopted the Arabic naskh script, Urdu speakers have stuck to their own beautiful script called nasta liq. For Urdu speakers, the prospect of giving up the script wasn’t on the table. It was the script that carried the Quran into India, supposedly handed down to Mir Ali of Tabriz by Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. That’s part of the reason why, into the 1980’s, Pakistani publications continued to be hand-copied by armies of calligraphers.
The article “How to bring a language to the future” on RestoftheWorld.org details the history of taking Urdu and its nasta liq script into the digital age. It’s filled with historical gems about the Urdu language, but also some biting commentary about the Anglocentricity of the typesetting industry. At one point the author, Alizeh Kohari observes:
Part of the reason nastaʿlīq ran into trouble was because the technology at the time — specifically the typewriter — was built with English in mind. Subsequently, as historian Thomas S. Mullaney notes in his book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” all other languages are seen as permutations from that norm. Hebrew is English but backward. Arabic is English backward and in cursive. Russian: English with different letters. Siamese: English with too many letters. Perhaps the only major language to escape the thumb of Latin hegemony was Chinese, a script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic, and thus had to be imagined entirely outside the box of existing technology. But nastaʿlīq, presumably not quite significant enough to send typographers back to the drawing board, remained stalled until the 1970s, its mechanical rendering nowhere close to the sweep and flourish of the handwritten script.
Keep your pencils sharp and your wits sharper for your end-of-year papers coming up.
Photo Credit / Smithsonian Magazine
