There’s an old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones …” Well, so much for that. Differences over words and their pronunciation probably cause more fierce peacetime skirmishes than even sport and who controls the armrest on a plane.
The latest field of combat is “mischievous”. Lexicographer Susie Dent, best known as resident word expert on British game show Countdown, has said she no longer minds that most people say “mis-chee-vee-ous.”
The rate at which tops came off heads throughout the comments sections of the English-speaking world was entirely predictable. Like apostrophe vigilantes and Oxford comma-deniers, protectors of English – English English, mind, not American or (shudder) Australian English – never rest.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins immediately denounced the evolution of the word to four syllables, and British children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce lamented that even BBC announcers couldn’t get it right these days.
Dent was forced to rush out a semi-correction, saying she still regarded the three-syllable version as the right and proper one. But the people had disagreed.
In its defence, mis-chee-vee-ous is onomatopoeic, its playful cadence evoking its meaning rather better than the choppy mis-chi-vous.
Dent says English speakers have always “pushed out” forms they’re no longer familiar with. The ending “ievous” is no longer common, so people are converting the form to one they’re familiar with.
“We [lexicographers] are describers, not prescribers, of language,” Dent said. “English has always been an entirely democratic affair, subject to the will of the people.”
Even if they’re wrong, was the theme of further brawling over other English words being vandalised or modernised, depending on one’s taste.
A prime antagoniser is pronunciation – fittingly, often pro-nown-ciation. “Schedule”, for instance, is “shed-yul” in English English, the hard “c” being an Americanisation.
Espresso is often (or provokingly “off-ten”) “ex-presso”, though there is a logic, given it’s something that comes out of – ex – a press.
And perhaps it’s forgivable that “specific”, a bit of a tongue-
twister, so often loses its “s”.
As for “nu-cu-lar” for nuclear – if only that went without saying.
Still, we English-speakers are equal-opportunity language manglers. In vain might Ukrainians plead that Kyiv has two syllables: Kee-iv, not Keev.
“Impact” as a verb is a constant affront to purists, but has now near-universally supplanted the quietly heroic “affect”, so surely that battle is lost. Why? It’s so much more dynamic than “affect”, so many people think it gives weight to their sentences. Even when there’s no need, because the “impact” is negligible, as in, “The new rules will impact fewer than five people.” (Best not to start on intransitives here, or prepositions, or on the endangerment of “fewer” from the remorseless rampage of “less”.)
The beginning of sentences, particularly answers to questions, with, “So, …” is another ineradicable torment to conservative grammarians. Still, it’s only a latter-day challenger to, “Well, …” over which they also traditionally despair. The continuation of the pause-word habit probably shows … well, so, um, we often need a pause word for thinking time.
Social media and comments sections brim with arguably worse offences. It’s hard to take seriously someone who posts an opinion, then adds, “Simples!”
As for those who sign off, “Just sayin’!”, let’s reserve a special circle in hell for such vacuous redundancy. As well as it being perfectly obvious they were “just” articulating something and not enacting or enforcing it, it hardly lets them off the hook if what they “just said” was inane. Which it very often is.
Dent says it’s a fine thing that language should arouse so much passionate attention. In a nod to Mrs Malaprop, a lexicographal treasure from English literature, she wrote that she now better understood why she was often described as being “a minefield of information”.
