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Whoa, y’all! Today is Day Three of Language Week, or what might more appropriately be called Language Weak, when readers get to vent about crimes committed against English, in print and on the tongue.
Cathy Henry of Annandale, Va., is just one of several readers who have noticed a woeful uptick in the use of “woah” for “whoa.”
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“Universal Studios had a whole campaign with ‘woah,’” she wrote.
Indeed. Universal’s campaign was called “Let Yourself Woah.”
How about I don’t?
As for “y’all” — the inclusive expression so beloved in the American South — surely it’s a contraction of “you all.”
And yet, wrote Franco Turrinelli of Chicago, “in the rental car center at the Atlanta airport — so seen by many, many people — a large billboard from the tourism bureau says ‘ya’ll.’”
I wonder if the wandering letters of “woah” and the wandering apostrophe of “ya’ll” would remind a medieval grammar nerd of how the mildly blasphemous oath “God’s wounds” became “zounds.”
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Lois Kurowski of Fairfax, Va., thinks “only” is one of the most powerful four-letter words in the English language. But only when it’s used correctly.
“However it usually is not,” she wrote.
Lois saw a post on a news site about the battle to become speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. The writer intended to emphasize the Republicans’ narrow House majority and wrote that Rep. Steve Scalise could “only afford to lose four votes.”
Proper usage, Lois wrote, calls for writing that Scalise could “afford to lose only four votes.”
Wrote Lois: “Most writers don’t seem to understand that ‘only’ creates what I call a silent comparison: only this not that.”
Bill Dupuy of Santa Fe, N.M., finds fault with a certain insurance company and its slogan: “Liberty Mutual: Only pay for what you need.”
Wrote Bill: “As if there was a reasonable alternative for this ungrammatical use of the modifier ‘only’ in the context of the Liberty ad: Only argue/fight/commit murder for what you need?”
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It should be, “Pay for only what you need.”
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Misspellings irk us, too. Delaware’s Nancye Vermillion is tired of reading “sneak peak” instead of “sneak peek.”
“It is rampant in real estate social media posts and makes me nuts,” she wrote.
Abigail James of Wintergreen, Va., has a separate issue, or rather, a “seperate” issue. For many years, she taught an introductory chemistry class at a boys school. Students were required to write up their lab exercises, including what was in various compounds and solutions. The word “separate” frequently showed up in lab reports, as in to separate salt from a solution of salt water.
“The first time the students misspelled the word, I pointed it out to them and stated that the next time they misspelled the word they would lose a point — out of 10 for a report,” Abigail wrote. “The third time, I refused to grade the report. They got a 0. Within a couple of weeks, all students were spelling ‘separate’ correctly.”
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Abigail said the only time she almost lost it was when a student asked, “Mrs. James, when is it correct to use ‘seperate’?”
Boy, this space is in danger of becoming a real judgment zone, unlike Planet Fitness, the health club chain that prides itself on being a “Judgement Free Zone.”
Wait a minute, wrote Barbara Mayes of Oak Park, Ill. Shouldn’t it be “judgment”?
Wrote Barbara: “I initially thought the chain must be based in the United Kingdom because in U.K. English, ‘judgement’ is standard, while ‘judgment’ is standard in the United States. Company headquarters, however, are in Hampton, N.H., which is definitely not in the U.K.”
I checked with Planet Fitness. Turns out, what had been a bug became a feature. Whoever created the slogan around 1997 realized they had made a mistake with the spelling.
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Wrote a representative from the health club in an email: “Planet Fitness considered changing it, but thought it made the brand different and fit really well with its judgement free personality.”
As you can see in that email, they’re really leaning into “judgement.”
Finally, Richard K. Neumann, an author of textbooks on writing from Larchmont, N.Y., wants to push back against the notion that “this data” — as opposed to “these data” — is wrong.
“That claim is based on the idea that in Latin ‘data’ is the plural of ‘datum,’” he wrote. “But the fact that a word is a plural in its source language doesn’t mean that it’s a plural in English.”
Nouns, Richard explained, are either count nouns or mass nouns. Count nouns have plurals. “Fact” is a count noun. You might have one fact or three facts. Mass nouns have no plurals because they can’t be counted.
“Information” is a mass noun in English and you wouldn’t say “these informations.” “Data” usually is a mass noun, too.
Wrote Richard: “Every time I hear ‘these data,’ I want to know how many data there are. Does the speaker have 41 data or 97 data?”
Tomorrow: More language data.
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