Language pedants lurk everywhere, waiting to snigger smugly at your split infinitive (something so easy to accidentally do). I confess: I am one. And, like the Freemasons, we pedants like nothing better than discovering another language purist.
Just this week, a friend of some years revealed (confessed?) that she is similarly passionate about language. And every pedant has their own particular bêtes noires. My friend has a loathing of ‘enormity’ being deployed to mean ‘great size’ (incorrect) rather than ‘great wickedness’ (correct). My own include ‘less’ being substituted for ‘fewer’ (it’s “there are fewer people here” and not “there are less people here”) and ‘over’ being applied to numbers instead of ‘more than’. As my journalist mother (and fellow pedant) keeps telling me “you go over a bridge, not a number”. It’s “more than 10 cars” and not “over 10 cars”.
All too often, language is contorted into the most unnecessary shapes. And the business world is the biggest perpetrator of this terrible crime – you can read my blog on corporate wonks loving to ‘leverage’ here. Many people assume that more complex language is better language and so they elevate what they say, invariably incorrectly, in an attempt to sound more polite, more clever or more posh.
Browsing in Waterstones just the other week I spotted a ‘Book of English Verbs, Fully Conjugated’ which included, unbelievably, the verb ‘to interface’ in all its supposed forms. “I interface, you interface, they interfaced, we will interface” and so on. Since when was ‘to interface’ a verb?! And don’t get me started on ‘to diarise’ (apparently meaning ‘to put in your diary’).
Another growing calamity is to misuse ‘myself’, ‘yourself’ and ‘themselves’ when the sense is not reflexive. It can be a bit of a tricky one, admittedly, but you only use one of these when the subject of the verb (ie: I, you, she/he/it, we or they) is doing it TO themselves. So “I wash myself” or “please help yourselves” or “they drove themselves”.
What is absolute gibberish is the waitress who said to me recently “can I get anything else for yourselves?” which I suppose implies that we would get it while she watched! She actually said “can I get anything else for yourselves at all?” These extra two words get endlessly tacked on to phrases when they add nothing and can, in fact, only properly be used in the negative – eg: “I didn’t eat anything at all.”
Sometimes, the errors are just hilarious. 
An airline check-in agent was overheard by a relative asking a passenger “could anyone have unknowingly tampered with your bag at all?” which strikes me as more of a metaphysical conundrum than a security question.
But does any of this matter? How important is language and its correct deployment?
A friend from university – an excellent English teacher and extremely clever bloke – once stated on Facebook that he was “bored of” something. I commented (in my annoying grammar pedant way) that this was a fairly egregious clanger from an English teacher. It should, of course, be “bored with”. I fully expected a contrite response and a red-faced acknowledgement that he had slipped up. I was a little surprised when he responded: “Sod off. Common usage is king.”
Is that true? Does common usage trump what the grammar books (I still love my Fowler’s) say is ‘right’? Personally I think there has to be a sensible compromise. Language is always evolving, changing, growing and developing. But whilst I am fundamentally open minded (I, for one, will happily start sentences or paragraphs with ‘and’ or ‘but’, something that would enrage a traditionalist) there has to be a sense of rule, structure and style – things which should be observed, sometimes strictly.
And just to prove that some companies will simply change the meaning of words to suit themselves, my sister tells the story of booking a delivery with a courier company on a “Before Noon” service. At 12.15pm when the package still hadn’t arrived, she rang the firm to ask where it was. “Well,” the woman replied, “Noon for us means 1pm.” You couldn’t make it up.
Well, I guess it’s nice to be a “clever bloke” . . .
I don’t fundementally disagree with your argument; the key, for me, though, is that we use language to communicate.
Obviously, at times incorrect grammar inhibits meaning – just today I used Duncan’s: ‘go, get him surgeons’ line as an example of how a missing, or moved comma, changes the message. Nevertheless, I would question to what extent a split infinitive here or a noun-used-as-a-verb there affects understanding.
I won’t trot out the old line about English grammar rules being artificially Latinate, but there is certainly an argument that, at a time when ‘Standard English’ and ‘RP’ are increasingly becoming a minority version of the English that is spoken and written worldwide, linguistic pedantry is frightfully parochial.
I noted to you that ‘Common usuage is king’ and that is certainly the way that language develops over time. ‘Holy day’ to ‘holiday’ et al. To enforce rules and prescriptons from the nineteenth centry on a language that has developed beyond the boundaries of pen and ink is unworkable.
I’m not writing about language use that is nonsensical – my school is hideously corporate, so business speech is a pet peeve of mine – but, rather, a choice of words that is perfectly clear within a broad consensus. I would suggest that put a bunch of people in the room and ask them to choose between ‘bored of’ and ‘bored with’ and a majority would struggle to care – but they would understand what was meant.
Finally, and I guess what I think is my winning argument, no one is being taught it anymore. If you think language use is bad now, give it twenty years . . .
(as a disclaimer, I have no proofread this reply. All errors are obviously intended ironically)
I loved this, and in answer to pmerrel’s reply: surely the point is that it is the responsibility of language lovers everywhere to present themselves as beacons of excellence?
A simple analogy: some people choose to walk around sporting the ridiculous fashion of wearing their trousers hanging below their underpants; what’s more, some clothing manufacturers produce trousers designed to look like they are hanging beneath the wearers’ underpants. It looks ridiculous and – to my mind at least – thoroughly offensive. When I communicate with people dressed in this absurd fashion, should I loosen my own trousers, for fear that they will not take me for one of their own?
I think not. “Dumbing down” the language for fear of adverse criticism from those who can’t or won’t use it properly is a sad indictment of how little value modern society places on aspirational education.
I try my hardest to speak concisely, and in good English. No doubt I am sometimes guilty of mistakes that would drive a pendant to suicide, nevertheless I’m frequently complimented on my voice and use of language, not least by those who, in every nuance of their own speech, betray a secret longing to improve their own communication skills.
Perhaps pmerrel is right that the decline (as distinct from the evolution) of our language is inevitable, and that we should all just adopt the slang of the moment and to hell with it. I have no intention of doing so.