YOUR BASIC LANGUAGE SNOB—that, friend, would be me—is never out of work. Just as he gets his wind back after railing about one or another overworked or idiotically used word, fresh misusages appear to cause him to get his knickers in a fine new twist. Everyday evidence of the inefficacy of my fulminations against the words focus (WEEKLY STANDARD, Oct. 28, 1996) and icon (WEEKLY STANDARD, Dec. 14, 1998) is available in the public prints, the airwaves, and what is amusingly called civilized discourse. With freshly twisted knickers, then, I persevere, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” I can bear the basketball announcer Marv Albert’s fulsome toupee—fulsome: “abundant to excess; offensive to normal tastes or sensibilities”—but I cannot bear his regularly misusing “differential,” as in “The Lakers have wiped out a twelve-point differential in the third quarter,” when what he really means is difference. A “differential” is a gear in a motor, a kind of equation, and a few other things, but never a twelve-point lead. Sometimes your language snob lies in wait, happy to pounce when people lapse into error by turning their pretensions up just a notch. Gerald M. Levin, CEO of AOL Time Warner, recently claimed to be “enthralled” by a new business idea, when he really meant that he was “thrilled.” Decimate in place of “devastate” or “destroy” is a golden oldie in this line, misused by too many people to name. The former means reduce by a tenth, and once meant “kill one in every ten,” a thing Romans were wont to do when capturing a town that put up resistance. Bryan A. Garner, in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, calls decimate a “skunked term,” or word now too heavily freighted with ambiguity to be used at all; even when used correctly, that is, it is likely to be taken wrongly. Pure goofyisms are always pleasing to the language snob. A reporter in the New York Times’s “Vows,” always good for a Sunday morning laugh, reports that, when a young woman first went out with the man she would eventually marry, her “cell phone was ringing off the hook.” I’d like to meet the man who sold her that cell phone with a hook. Did he, do you suppose, sell her a wall to go with it? Sometimes my language snobbery kicks in through pure personal pique. I don’t cotton to being referred to as “guys” by youthful waiters, especially when no one at our table is under sixty and one woman is in her nineties. Used in this way, “guys,” I suspect, has very unhealthy roots in political correctness. Rather than say, “Would you gentlemen [or ladies] care for dessert?” the waiter or waitress cowers behind the pseudo-friendly “guys.” The best language snobbery—which isn’t snobbery at all—concerns those items that go to a concern about the deprivation of the language by lazy linguistic constructions. Take the no longer so new use of fun as an adjective, as in “fun time,” “fun guy,” “fun couple,” “fun decade,” “fun serial killer.” Frank Rich, reviewing a recent biography of the choreographer Jerome Robbins, refers to the “smattering of fun gossip” in the book. Fun isn’t anywhere near a good enough adjective for gossip, which can be witty, subtle, crude, amusing, or vicious. Fun is, in fact, almost never good enough in any of its new usages; its use is a sign of a refusal to search out a more distinguishing, and thereby more vivid, word. The use of sharing is slipping out of control. I first encountered “sharing” at the National Endowment for the Arts, where people seemed always to want to share their experiences. Merely to hear them use the word made me wish I were instead at a small table in Vegas, being attacked by Don Rickles. I don’t like to be thanked for sharing, either, as I recently was for giving someone my phone number. “Reinventing oneself” is another phrase that can use serious overhaul, with a view to being put on the list of ought-to-be endangered terms. People seem to be reinventing themselves everywhere one looks these days. Movie stars, athletes, politicians—everybody’s doing it. A personal reinvention is, I gather, something akin to a makeover of the soul, usually implying a return in a new guise, always of course in improved form. Good luck. Another word in need of the firing squad is the suffix something, which had its beginning, I believe, on the television show thirtysomething. Soon after we were hearing about twenty-somethings and forty-somethings, though not yet ninety- and hundred-somethings. The sports page of the New York Times recently referred to Shaquille O’Neal as weighing “330-something pounds.” The something-suffix is on its way to serving as the equivalent for numbers of the flying whatever, so that we shall soon have someone described as “seven-foot-something,” distances between towns as 200-something miles, marriages lasting “two-decades-something.” What—so to speak—ever!
