My combined roles as television couch potato and language snob have not been easy on me. What I most watch on television is sports and news, with a fair amount of DVDs, these chiefly of English detective stories. Much of this television watching is done in the evening, when, as they say about major-league pitchers who have been hit hard, you can put a fork in me, I’m done. I turn on my television set, in the cant phrases of the day, to kick back, to chill, to knock off for the day.
Except I don’t, or at least not quite. Too often someone paid to know better—a newscaster, a sports announcer, a politician, a civil servant—will use a word or phrase that arouses my ire. Sometimes it will be a historical anachronism, or language used with chronological inconsistency, as when a character in a story set in Rome under the empire uses the phrase “check it out.” Just the other night on Downton Abbey, Lord Grantham referred to “the farming community,” when in 1925 he would surely instead have simply said “farmers” and let it go at that.
My readily aroused goat is perhaps too easily got. Until recently I would mumble, mutter, talk to, sometimes yell at the television screen, when someone dragged in a misused “impact” or “impacting” or, more egregious still, “impactful.” When politicians or pundits cannot begin a sentence on words other than “in terms of,” I would think of prison terms to which they ought to be sentenced, there to spend their days with shaved heads in striped uniforms diagramming sentences, with time out only for a bowl of gruel and a brief rest on a thin mattress. All this took its toll on my equanimity, who knows, possibly even on my health.
And then, one day, watching a Bears-Packers game riddled with penalties, the notion came to me to stop grumbling and instead toss a handkerchief, or flag, as they do in football for penalties, whenever misusages, errors, or simply idiotic language was used on television. In football the flags linesmen and referees toss are yellow. I had no yellow handkerchief, but I did own a red pocket square, which
I never used, and I removed it from the back of my sock drawer and put it into service. Now when someone on television refers to some obviously peripheral or ephemeral act as “a real game-changer,” I reach for my pocket square and toss it over the coffee table before my couch. Awarding penalties for sloppy language may not constitute a game-changer for me, but it has been a help.
I haven’t yet devised hand-signals for miscast use of language on television, though many of the terms currently in use for penalties in football fit the wretched use of language nicely. “Encroachment,” for example, covers many of the sins of ineptitude used by sports announcers, among them their inability to distinguish between the words “difference” and “differential.” “Delay of game” works for punditti or anchormen or panelists or sports color commentators who are repetitious or otherwise boring. “Unnecessary roughness” would cover the talk of most postgame interviews with athletes. A heavy use of clichés would be “unsportsmanlike conduct.” Self-acclaimed virtue—politicians are big on this—would be “excessive celebration.” I haven’t a football analogy for the use of psychobabble, but without question it’s a 15-yard penalty. As for those who assure us they are “caring,” are eager to “share,” push the pedal down hard on that Hallmark word “special,” and seem always to be “reaching out,” I should like nothing so much as myself to reach out to give them a Dutch rub.
The flag flies with great frequency chez Epstein. “Pro-active” is a 10-yard penalty. “Empathy,” with its uglier sister “empathize,” is another 10-yarder. So are most uses of “global.” Those politicians accused of scandal along with those athletes accused of wife-beating who always want to go “forward” must not be allowed to do so without a flag to accompany them on their way. Nothing to be done, I realize, about other athletes who bid fair to lead whatever league they are playing in in the use of “you knows.” Weathermen and women, with their penchant for those fake possessives—”your record rainfall,” “your wind-chill factor”—are regularly penalized from my couch. You will not be surprised to learn that those who “at the end of the day” want only “a level playing field” are, in my eyes, “on the wrong page,” may even “have lost the plot.”
From time to time I urge myself to knock off these perhaps piddling criticisms. But a language snob’s work, as you will have gathered, is never done. He cannot let up. At least this language snob cannot. Besides, picking up all those tossed flags gives the couch potato in me nearly all the exercise he gets.
