A good many years ago, I joined the Unicorn Hunters Club, a campaign started, I seem to remember, by a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. For a small fee, I received a membership card and a lapel button about the size of a nickel and was urged to track down and eradicate misuses of the English language. Even though the mythical unicorn is supposedly endowed with eternal purity and would seem to be desirable, unicorns are also reputed to be elusive and I suppose that is why they were elected to symbolize the sins of poor grammar.
Unicorns (as grammatical errors) are said to be elusive in the sense that we often don’t see them as errors, even though they are right there in plain sight. Some errors are so common that we have become accustomed to them and no longer consider them to be incorrect. This, of course, is one of the ways that language evolves, and while change in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, changes that weaken language and render it less precise should be rejected. There are a number of words that have very specific meanings, especially those that are meant for use in certain fields of endeavor such as medicine, music, or the military. Those words often get picked up and used in a more general way. Usually they become a sort of language fad for a short time and eventually fade from use.
At other times these words catch on and remain stubbornly in the language in their misdirected usages because they sound similar to other words that we have known for a long while.
Take the word “parameter” for instance. This became popular about 15 years ago, mostly because it sounds similar to “perimeter” even though it is not a synonym, and partly because enough people thought it sounded classier than the old familiar word. Fortunately that unicorn has nearly become extinct.
I’ve been particularly annoyed by the word “segue” being used in place of “transition.” Segue was a word long specific to the world of music where it is used to indicate a smooth transition between movements in music, or from one number to another in a medley. Using it to cover transitions in other areas (such as changing topics during a conversation, or passing a basketball to a teammate) weakens its meaning. Such fads, fortunately, tend to die out after a few years, but “segue” has landed in the dictionary as no longer specific to music, thus causing a kind of damage to the language by weakening its original meaning and depriving the world of music of a specialized word.
One escaped unicorn.
We’ve all heard the more common misuses of words in television commercials. Who hasn’t listened to some man in a white coat telling us that denture material is “different to the enamel of our natural teeth?” I’ve known since first grade that things are “similar to” or “different from” other things. And how many actors (portraying sufferers of everything from toenail fungus to cancer) have asked if we suffer from the same condition “like me.” What they’re really saying is “if you have this condition like me (do.”) I’ve campaigned against that ungrammatical expression for years and, just maybe, someone is actually listening. One of those commercials has recently switched to saying, “If you have (whatever) like I do.” Hooray! I’m not taking direct credit for this vast improvement, as there are probably lots of other unicorn hunters out there who may have complained to somebody who listened, but changing “me” to “I do” is certainly a step in the right direction.
One unicorn on the run.
There are a few words that nobody seems to use correctly, and even when they do it sounds awkward and pompous. One of those words is “whom” and just about everybody is vague about just when to use it and when to use “who.” When the receptionist who answers the phone asks, “Whom shall I say is calling?” she is not only sounding affected, she is wrong. “Who” is used in the same way as “he” and “she” and “whom” is used like “him” or “her.”
Because the receptionist put it in the form of a question, we can rephrase it to make it simpler to analyze. “I shall say whom is calling.” If you replace “whom” with “him,” it comes out, “I shall say him is calling.” And we all know that doesn’t sound right. Change that to, “I shall say he is calling,” and you know you’ve got it right, so you should replace “whom” with “who.” Now, I know nobody is going to run through that exercise before they decide whether to use “who” or “whom,” so I recommend getting rid of the word “whom” altogether and using “who” all the time. We’re all so used to saying and hearing it, anyway, and nobody is sure which is right, so if there is no longer such a word as “whom” we won’t have to figure out whether or not to use it.
One banished unicorn?