Common Solecisms - Words you are almost certainly using incorrectly | Hacker News Reader

Common Solecisms - Words you are almost certainly using incorrectly

economist.com

73 pointssmanek66 comments

I freaking hate prescriptive linguistics. The people who love to prescribe are so often prescribing incorrectly. I couldn't get past the first one in this article:

> Acronym: this is a word, like radar or NATO, not a set of initials, like the BBC or the IMF.

Wikipedia:

> In 1943, Bell Laboratories coined the term acronym as the name for a word (such as SONAR) created from the first letters of each word in a series of words (such as SOund Navigation And Ranging). The terms initialism and alphabetism are neither widely used nor widely known. The term acronym is widely used to describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters.

First off, the word was created by a corporation; secondly, the term is widely used and understood to apply to words like "BBC" ("Three Letter Acronym"); thirdly, the "correct" alternative is not widely used or understood. So if you use the correct terms your communication would actually be less clear, which is, as I understand, the point of studying grammar/linguistics in the first place.

For more on this exciting subject, see David Foster Wallace's excellent "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage":

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html

And on top of that, how is NATO not a set of initials? Doesn't it stand for North Atlantic Treaty Organization?

'NATO' and 'SCUBA' are pronounceable. The Economist contends that'BBC' and 'IMF' aren't acronyms since you can't pronounce the words they form (you just sound out the letters).

It seems that they have never actually followed their own advice, however.

Search for initialism at economist.com: 0 results (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeconomist.com+initiali...)

the acronym for CCTV has become an oft-used pejorative (http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_i...)

Institute of National Remembrance (IPN, in its Polish acronym) (http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story...)

etc., etc...

I was thinking the same thing. One of the rules is that 'agreed' goes with 'on', 'to', or 'about'. But the Economist is the only place I can think of where I have seen something like:

"Only after a short truce was agreed were the envoys..." http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/displaystory.c...

"A peace pact of sorts was agreed just days before the auction..." http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor...

Yeah ... I don't know how I feel about it either. I like to imagine that I have a pretty good grasp of English - but I'm pretty sure I violate about half those rules on a regular basis.

In any case, it's informative to see the style guide of one of the best periodicals in existence. Also, there are some really hilarious jokes hidden in there if you're into easter eggs ;-)

Agreed; there are some people who cannot grasp the concept of evolving language, often forgetting that much of the language we use today was considered "incorrect" as recently as ten years ago. The irony of this prescription is that many of the writers whom we consider the most influential and talented are often those who do not constrain themselves to these rules (and in doing so, often develop new phrases and structures that become part of regular language).

Some of the advice given in this article is simply wrong. As an alternative to this article, I'd suggest Paul Brians' site, (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/errors.html) which points out legitimate errors while recognizing trends and usages which have become acceptable.

The problem is that for every evolving "rule", you reduce (or have the potential to reduce) the clarity of the message.

Ergo a language with loose rules is a language with loose communication capability. (Of course this is arguable too, since a language that is too rigid is unable to adapt to a fast changing world.)

English is the start-up of the language world, apparently. :-)

> The problem is that for every evolving "rule",

> you reduce (or have the potential to reduce)

> the clarity of the message.

I respectfully disagree. If we refused to accept colloquial usage of a word as valid, we would actually be reducing meaning therein.

Would you advocate using archaic definitions of common words from 100 years ago? 200 years ago? How about we maintain this purported clarity by reverting to Middle English?

I used to be anal toward the definition of words until I got a little older. Then I realized that, over time, language does indeed evolve.

Here's a good example for you. "The web." If we didn't accept the "evolved" definition of this word as a synonym for "the Internet," then the statement "Catch Hacker News on the web!" would be nonsensical.

You can be a purist to a degree, but to declare that such an approach improves clarity is a bit... misguided. :) (I'll grant that you did suggest it has the "potential to," but I want to assist in preventing others from making broad generalizations against the evolution of language, so this isn't necessarily directed to you.)

To be fair, this is their style guide, and the editors can choose the rules they want for word usage in their magazine, and they are generally done so to help make sure their writers use a consistent style.

Very good point. I was about to jump into the prescriptivist-bashing fray - in fact, I upvoted subwindow's comment, and I can't take it back, since I don't have enough karma - until I took a look at the heading of the "article" and realized that it was in fact part of the Economist's style guide. It's clearly not meant to be accurate reflection of any up-to-date dictionary - look up pretty much any word in its list at www.m-w.com (e.g. "collapse" IS acceptable as a transitive verb) and you'll see they're way behind the times as far as common usage goes. Let them maintain their backward-looking editorial standards if they wish to do so for consistency's sake, and leave them be.

It may be their internal style guide, which is fine for them to have, but the submission title is still bogus.

>this is a word,

Did you miss that part? Radar is said ray-dar, not r-a-d-a-r. Same goes with NATO, Scuba, etc etc.

BBC on the other hand, is not pronounced bibibc. It's said b-b-c.

Basically, most dictionaries require an acronym be a word itself, otherwise it's an abbreviation. You're correct though that this is not universal.

Okay so is 'SQL' an acronym? :)

Also is "TLA" an acronym, or do its initials just lie?

Technically, no. (I've never understood how anyone got sequel from S-Q-L.)

And TLA is more correctly Three Letter Abbreviation. :-)

But like I said, I know there is no hard and fast rule. Acronym has had its meaning changed through popular use, and there isn't much to harp about there. It's as futile as pointing out that "begging the question" is used incorrectly 99% of the time.

For a style guide though, there's nothing wrong with insisting on a particular definition.

  > Technically, no. (I've never understood how anyone got
  > sequel from S-Q-L.)

Sequel is quicker to pronounce than es-cue-ell, so it's very attractive for that reason. For similar reasons, I generally pronounce /etc as 'etsy'.

The first version was called SEQUEL.

I've never understood how anyone got sequel from S-Q-L.

They didn't. They got SQL from SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language). After the name was changed from SEQUEL to SQL people just kept saying "sequel" since it's easier to say than "s-q-l".

Did not know that. I've been using this thing for close to 15 years and hadn't a clue! :-)

But like I said...

According to my 9th grade English teacher Mrs. Hawks, that is grammatically incorrect. You meant to say "But as I said".

> I freaking hate prescriptive linguistics.

I tend toward being a little picky about grammar, but this particular style guide is a bit ridiculous. So, I have to agree.

Here's one that strikes me as odd:

> Demographics: no, the word is demography.

Seems to me that demographics is commonly accepted as a valid study.

The Economist claims this is a guide to "common solecisms." I wonder if their claim to solecisms is a solecism itself?

> a nonstandard or ungrammatical usage, as "unflammable" and "they was."

In their defense, they do highlight several words that are pet peeves of mine (among/between). Though, to outright claim that others are outright nonstandard or incorrect is a bit misleading.

demographic is an adjective, like financial. True, people say financials when they mean financial (statement)s, but I share the Economist's dislike of this linguistic slop.

Consider also that the written word still enjoys somewhat higher esteem in Britain, where the Economist is published; it is by no means uncommon to find corpses in the gutter of London's Fleet Street in the early dawn, driven to suicide by the shame of a misplaced apostrophe.

Sure, but words mean things. I can't see the harm in knowing the most appropriate word for my meaning, even if most everyone is oblivious to the preference.

There are items I find questionable too ("Brokerage is what a stockbroking firm does, not what it is."), but most of it is good.

"Cassandra's predictions were correct but not believed."

"Beg the question means neither raise the question, invite the question nor evade the answer. To beg the question is to adopt an argument whose conclusion depends upon assuming the truth of the very conclusion the argument is designed to produce."

"Crescendo. This is not an acme, apogee, peak, summit or zenith but a passage of increasing loudness. You cannot therefore build to a crescendo."

Yes!

I agree.

That said, "performant" is not, has never been, and will never be a word.

(This is not directed at you, parent poster, but I see that .. group of letters .. crop up all the time in HN stories and comments)

That said, "performant" is not, has never been, and will never be a word.

Well, it's certainly Not A Duck.

It's pronounceable, it has a widely accepted spelling and definition… Seems like a word to me. Time to get over it, I think.

Mind, it might be an annoying, ugly, overlong, or otherwise undesirable word.

I have a vendetta against "utilize", myself.

'blint' is pronounceable but doesn't actually mean anything. The same is true of my username, for that matter.

'Performant' doesn't have any etymological basis, nor does it fill any real need; such words only serve to highlight their employers' lack of vocabulary. Children make up such portmanteau words on a regular basis, but this is generally the result of ignorance rather than originality and is generally curable with the help of a dictionary and thesaurus.

English has such a massive vocabulary that if you need a new word and you're not writing a fantasy/sci-fi novel, then it probably means that you weren't paying attention.

Does it mean "fast" or "efficient" or something else? Both those words are shorter and more widely understood.

It means that something "performs well". The specific criteria of performance depends on context.

Both "fast" and "efficient" are more specific than performant, but are related concepts. Note that "speed" and "efficiency" are also often related, but not quite the same thing. They fill a different linguistic need.

Performant is pretty widely understood, in my experience.

I agree.

Nuh-uh. This style guide says "Agree: things are agreed on, to or about, not just agreed." So, bizarrely, "I agree" or "We agree" are not valid, despite any good dictionary saying otherwise.

Of course, this could be because it's a style guide and most people here seem to have missed that point ;-)

This is swimming upstream given the progress of the thread, but I loved this.

It's an opinionated style guide. If you disagree, that's of course fine - and part of the reason I liked it, I suspect, was that it fits well with my own idiolect - but there's a distinction to be drawn between language (non-prescriptive) and style (which you can be as prescriptive about as you like).

One of the best aspects of the Economist is its style; both of its prose and its design. Its politics I can take or leave, but at least it's honest about where it stands.

"English is what English-speaking people speak." "Correct" English is a different matter - it serves no higher purpose than to keep you in your place.

I would like to see a guide that gives compelling reasons for how each rule increases clarity. George Orwell's guide comes to mind: http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Wikipedia summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...

"Correct" English is a different matter - it serves no higher purpose than to keep you in your place.

Using incorrect language, however, makes whatever you are writing about seem less thought-out or even just plain wrong.

Have you ever read 4chan? You can argue that that's English, since it's English speakers using the English language... but you will surely agree that their version of English makes them look like uneducated morons, even without considering what they are trying to say.

Anyway, the style guide here suggests that authors use the clearest word to describe a given situation or quality. I don't see anything wrong with this -- clarity is always good. (Your writing could still be understandable without using the words correctly, but why use incorrect words just because some other people are also wrong?)

You criticise 4chan speakers as sounding uneducated. That's a judgment about class, not content. Do you really think the purpose of education is class mobility, rather than, say, argumentative, expositional, philosophical and technical knowledge and skills? A criticism that their writing as uninformed, uninteresting and pointless would have more substance (which you imply with "morons".)

I agree that if one wants to impress others, perhaps seeking preferential favour, one had best take care to sound "educated" (for that specific aim, it doesn't matter whether one actually has the knowledge and skills of education, since it's just about appearance). If one seek to communicate with others, to relate, to collaborate, to share information, clarity is more important than sounding educated.

Of course, arbitrarily humpty-dumpty incorrect usage will confuse listeners, but the style guide fusses about what "acronym" and "alternative" mean, strictly and technically. Can you give an example where the specific incorrect use they mention is less clear? BTW: I probably should have replied to the top comment about "acronyms".

Where does it say to "use the clearest word"? The word "clear" doesn't come up when I search for it on that page...

You're probably already read Orwell's piece at some point - if not, have a look, it's great.

To be fair, the guide doesn't outright state "use the clearest word", but the implication's clear; the entries for pressurise and for critique, for example.

Orwell's essay is fabulous, as you say!

The thing that comes to mind here is the notion of a "controlled vocabulary" from library science. When you're building a hierarchical model of concepts (Library of Congress, or Dewey Decimal Classification) it helps to have a relatively small and consistent set of identifiers so that you can consistently refer to the same thing.

I think of good English usage as being similar. When what you mean is X, use the word for X. So these sorts of lists of usage can be thought of as a mapping from concepts to words.

English is dynamic, true, but you have to remember that when you talk about "English is what English speakers speak" I think you have to also consider, to avoid a grave disservice to history, that "English speakers" mean not only those walking around today, but all the vast collection of written words through the ages.

Nice point. It's backcompatibility with legacy uses (use is a synonym for application.) And so the familiar battle between current usage and backcompatibility plays itself out in this arena, with the familiar casualties of irregular special cases, unconceived foundations and unretractable experiments.

It all depends on the sense with which you approach something. I have been a loyal reader of the Economist for a decade now, and have arrived at the point of finding competing publications almost unreadable due to the poor standards of writing and the substitution of affectation for real style.

On the other hand, I also enjoy reading 4chan and post there occasionally - sometimes in clear English, sometimes in LOLspeak. Though many there are undoubtedly only semi-literate, many others are simply having fun at the expense of others (as can be seen by the relatively correct use at Encyclopedia Dramatica). If you use the 'wrong' misspellings at 4chan - I kan has chisburgar, say - you'll just get laughed at.

"Anarchy means the complete absence of law or government. It may be harmonious or chaotic." I was glad to read that. I'm so tired of people who believe that anarchy implies chaos.

I'm so tired of people who insist that it doesn't.

"Anarchy" (the word) isn't a political argument, it just means "an-" without, "-arkhos" leader.

"Anarchy" should just mean whatever the writer intends it to.

I agree.

- Which means I don't, because I intended it to mean that I don't.

Yes I'm being facetious, but you see the issue with your logic, correct?

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#In_Through_the_Lo...

"Gender is a word to be applied to grammar, not people. If someone is female, that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the German word for girl, is neuter, as is Weib, a wife or woman.)"

That's doing some pretty hard core identity theory without a license. What would Judith Butler say?

That's not identity theory; it's just a definition. That said, you can use "gender" in situations where using "sex" would cause uncomfortable atmosphere, correctly or no, so there's no way we're getting that distinction back.

There's another context: gender can mean the psychological and social aspect of sexual identification. I believe that's what the "identity-theory" bit refers to.

My favorite: Actionable

It used to mean: "affording grounds for legal action" -- that is you can be sued for it.

Now, marketing folks (and politicians) use it to mean "something they can do".

If they say something's actionable, ask if you can sue them. ;)

Andy Grove's biography tells the story how he had Bill Gates over for dinner to discuss the relationship between Intel and Microsoft. Upon hearing one if Andy's proposals, an excitable Gates said that it would "be actionable" (meaning the company could act on it). Andy misunderstood, and stood up from the table and angrily pointed at Bill and shouted "are you threatening to sue me?!". The meeting went badly from that point, and presaged a bad relationship between the companies for years to come.

To me actionable means "something I can act upon," not necessarily something I can do, e.g., a specific piece of information that makes the next decision obvious.

If I meant "something I can do" I'd say "possible."

That's just my point. It doesn't mean that.

Yes it does.

If it means that to me and everyone else who uses the word in the same way, how can it not "mean that?" Because that's not what's in the dictionary? Because that's not what someone who lived 100, 50, 25 years ago would have meant when they said it?

I don't buy it. Language is defined by its usage, not the other way around. If I say "actionable" and everyone understands what I mean by it -- yourself included, if only begrudgingly -- then what does it mean if not the thing which everyone understands?

Maybe you misunderstood the words in my answer because they didn't mean what you think you read...

You are free to redefine the meaning of any word you want. But that's what the article was about -- misusing words.

>Appeal is intransitive nowadays (except in America), so appeal against decisions.

Americans make up 67% of the world's native English speakers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_dialects1997_modif...

Furthermore, second language learners get far more exposure to Hollywood and US television than they do to RP or whatever the Economist considers to be "standard" language. I can respect their pride in their language, but American, or more accurately North American English, is more than some minority dialect. It's the defacto world standard.

"Aggression is an unattractive quality, so do not call a keen salesman an aggressive one (unless his foot is in the door or beyond)."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - there are no supporting arguments for the idea that aggression is always unattractive. Like much of the rest of the article this is also prescriptive.

Educational but I think some of these proscriptions are a little stodgy. For example, I know what "alibi" really means but the usage of the word has expanded to conveniently include more explanations than only proven ones, because it is typically used in situations of alleged guilt over some crime.

I knew that if I read long enough I'd find some error and I surely did: "Thus a dilemma offers the choice between two alternatives, each with equally nasty consequences." The department of redundancy department seems to have written about the two alternatives.

I don't see any error.

The definition of 'alternative' in the article is "strictly, this is one of two, not one of three, four, five or more" and as such, the phrase 'two alternatives' is unnecessary.

Many of these are perfectly good points, and others are stylistically pleasing (like the "don't get a verb, verb it" one), but some are just strange, particularly the hostility to metaphors and other figures of speech ("epicenter" and "bellwether").

Agreed. Not only that, but a literal epicenter isn't even necessarily underground.

Any geologists care to chime in on this one?

Worth reading, but note that it has a slight british slant, and some of the words are different in the US. (For example a Keen salesman.)

This begs the question, when are people going to stop misusing that horrible phrase?

Aggression is an unattractive quality

In certain delineated contexts, it is most certainly attractive, as my girlfriend would attest. It's unattractive if it leaks. One could argue that it's not true aggression, unless it is so.

Autarchy vs. Autarky

Good one!

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