Lingual Pet Peeves
A little highbrow pleasure for me is William Safire's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine. Sometimes he's boring, but this week I thought he was particularly on. So may I direct you there momentarily? He's much better than I am, so I urge you to read his piece in its unadulterated form.
For our purposes though, dear Mr. Safire took on a quote by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in which she listed three of her grammatical pet peeves:
- split infinitives
- inconsistent tense structure
- the passive voice
All three excellent points if you ask me, though more the second two. The first is a little bit too formal for my taste, and Mr. Safire quotes the illustrious Raymond Chandler appropriately, who wrote to his editor: "Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois . . . and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split."
But I started to think about the little writing ticks that bother me when reading manuscripts:
- Excessive use of "anyway" or "don't get me wrong" in 1st person in order to establish voice.
- Too many exclamation points to create mood even though the words should speak for themselves.
- Verbal expressions put into the narration, like "Whew!" or "Argh!" Not so necessary.
- Misuse of apostrophes, confusion of their, they're and there, etc...
To name a few.
Of course, when you read as much as one in this industry has to, you start to get really sensitive to these little ticks. You want the words on the page to soothe the eyes, not jar them. Irritants become more powerful, so we learn to suss out the writers who have smooth prose almost intuitively. And the regular readers of this blog out there know that I'm the stickler for word usage around here and expound almost weekly about how to write tightly.
But enough about me...what are your grammatical and lingual pet peeves?
William Safire, editing, grammar, writing goals
Reader Comments (10)
"Begs the question"
Begging the question is the logical fallacy of smuggling one's conclusion into one's premise. It drives me nuts when professional writers use "begs the question" to mean "Demands that we ask the question."
Being quite the Strunk & White junkie, I love this post. Exclamation points scare the hell out of me. As a high school English teacher, I saw them everywhere. Any time a kid wanted to make what he/she thought was an important point...slap an exclamation point behind it.
Sure, I use them when I post on line, but this is a different medium. And I have to say that Mr. Sapphire must have cut his teeth on Elements of Style as well, because so much of what he says comes right from that sacred text. I live in fear of the split infinitive because of E.B. White and a certain gifted English Teacher I know. I still hear his voice in my head...so thank you, Mr. Parr! (I make no apologies for that exclamation...)
Amen on that one!
There's no good reason to fear the split infinitive -- that's one of those "you can't do it in Latin, therefore it must be wrong" fallacies, and thank heavens it's on its way out.
BTW, not a big deal, but amusing that you misspelled "tic" in a post on errors... :-)
Excessive exclamation points and question marks bothers me too!!!! (How annoying is that?)
I also can't stand when people mess up singular plural agreement. It seems simple but it always happens. Don't forget, "everyone" and "everybody" is singular.
Okay, it may be an extra hour or two until I forward my revisions because I'm going to do a search and destroy mission for "anyway" and all the !!!'s....
Pet peeves not already mentioned include use of the non-words "irregardless" and "orientate." Splitting infinitives in dialogue or first person is something up with which I will put, when it sounds weird not to. Sorry.
I split infinitives. I refuse to give in on that one, and I don't write in any kind of broken-down patois.
I'm fine with 'their', 'they're', and 'there', and I ration my exclamation points carefully. My biggest bugaboo is adverb overuse -- and the word 'rather'. Whenever I edit my work, I can't get over all the 'rathers' I invariably manage to slip in. It's as though I can't commit myself to making a statement without hedging it with a 'rather'.
Adverbs that end in LY. How can "she ran quickly" compare to "she dashed?" Or (shudder) "I don't know, he said haltingly" compare to "I . . . I don't know." Give me a strong verb any day. Thank you, Dennis Ross of Miami, for that illuminating lesson.
The mangling of apostrophes frustrates me, too. I've also frequently seen "a lot" written as one word. My least favorite mistake, though, is the use of commas in places that require semicolons, dashes, or periods to prevent run-on sentences. I see things like, Sarah would know, she always knew about these things. I growl.
A linguistics professor friend of mine began his third-year class with the question, "What grammatical error bugs you most?" So very smugly, I replied, "split infinitives!" (This was years ago...) In mock horror he responded, "Surely you would not presume to alter the introduction to that most wonderful American classic, Star Trek, from 'to boldly go' to 'to go boldly'? I had to laugh: he had won, as he almost always did....