Language Mavens

In his book, the Language Instinct, Steven Pincker, the psycholinguist from Harvard University, describes how some people have to use correct language or grammar always. These people abhor the fact that artistic liberations can be taken to make a point or some rules can be bent in colloquial or verbal context.

In her book, Ex-libris - the Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman describes how her entire family is obsessed with the correctness of language and often frowns upon expressions such as the hoi polloi (hoi = the, so why the the people?) or finds mistakes in menu cards in a restaurant.

Largely, I belong to the category of the Anne Fadiman family and totally relate with people described by Steven Pincker as the language mavens.

But somehow, I stand by the puritanical approach to usage of language. Many times, we maul the language just because we do not know something. Strangely, my favorite is the matching of verbs with nouns in English. Agreed the GMAT version of matching verbs with nouns is complex. But here are some examples that may entertain you:

The INC placard saying: We welcomes Sonia Gandhi to Pune.
The hapless user: When I logs in, I get this errors.
One of the esteemed designers I know: The system will finds the request and submits to application server.

Lot of spelling mistakes on ETV Marathi and countless hoardings in Pune: the words like mhaNoon (hence, that’s why), karoon (do), baghoon (past participle of to see) etc. are to be spelt with the vowel “long u – dirgha ookar.” Invariably, these words are spelled with the “short u – rhaswa ookar”.

Another favorite is where plural versus singular is not distinguished. The word data is plural of datum. But many a times, people assume data as singular and datas as plural! Also, a case with criteria and criterias – somehow the criterion is lost!