Why communication isn't, or at least shouldn't be, accidental

One thing I detest, just really, absolutely detest, is wildly incorrect grammar passed off as being completely accurate. I don't want to come across as a complete chump when it comes to grammar, but there are certain ways of saying or writing something that are correct...and some that are the precise opposite.

I realise there's a problem in being so fixated upon correct grammar: different people speak and write in different ways, and over time linguistic practices change. However, there are just some practices without basis except a lack of awareness of what correct English looks and sounds like.

I have an issue, I'll say, with people saying "lay" when they mean "lie", for instance. In order to say "I lay", you either have to be speaking in the simple past tense ("Last night I lay on my bed"), or you must be speaking of performing an action upon something else ("I'm going to lay the paper upon the table"). Otherwise you have to use "lie": "I lie down", "I am lying down", "I was lying down". It really frustrates me to hear or read people using words that are inappropriate to their intended meaning. Yes, certainly, I understand what you're intending to say; however, that doesn't mean I should be doing the interpretative work for you because you're using the incorrect word. And it's a pretty simple situation: treat lie vs. lay as you would rise vs. raise. You wouldn't say "I raise" without saying what you raise - and so too you wouldn't say "I lay" without saying what you lay. Even if you're raising yourself up or laying yourself down, you absolutely must state what it is you're raising or laying. If you're just speaking of yourself in the simplest sense, you'd say "I rise up" or "I lie down". Simple as that!

It's not a big deal, I know. People aren't dying for the misuse of certain words. Nor are people suffering grievous bodily damage from misuse of adjectives as adverbs ("I'm good" when what is meant is "I'm well")...but misuse of words, and the use of incorrect classes of words, really can affect what it is that people interpret your meaning to be.

I would say I generally agree with the statement that choice of, say, "basal" words really encourages the perception of the speaker as somewhat uncivilised. Don't mistake my meaning: I swear. I probably swear a little too much, or at least too readily. Particular swear words can be useful in an emphatic sense - they really can increase the gravity of the statement being made quite effectively. Perhaps not, though, if they're being used as fillers as well. And often enough that's exactly what they're being used as, merely taking up space in (typically verbal) communication and derailing the message from effective and direct to muddled and unimaginative. There is the aspect of social decorum, certainly, but even if one only argues that if you're always saying "fudge", or something very similar, then use of the word "fudge" colours your language, and your command of it, as quite limited, rightly or wrongly.

To me effective communication is extremely important. Just in the first instance, if my writing were full of errors, misused punctuation, or incorrect verb forms, I should expect any readers I might have to be thoroughly confused and potentially turned away from my work. And, to be perfectly honest, I can't bring myself to buy petrol at a local gas station because of their billboard, which says "Your six sense, tells you to buy petrol here" (the italicised portion is the part I'm not quite sure of. The first sentence is the part that preoccupies my mind whenever I read it due to the appalling grammar). For an international petrol company to be represented so thoroughly badly does nothing to add positivity to its already reasonably tarnished image due to certain events in the past few years. I'm sure you may have an idea which company it may be, but that isn't the issue; the issue is the use of the cardinal "six" when the ordinal "sixth" should have been used, coupled with the inappropriate use of the comma dividing a singular clause into two partial, and incomplete, clause fragments. Yet this is printed in large format upon a billboard which obviously cost a fair bit of money to have designed, printed and subsequently affixed to the side of the petrol station's main building. It challenges me to think nobody saw the issue with such a low standard of English in a country wherein English is an official language, and indeed is the most widely-spoken of the two recognised official languages. That is, of course, going so far as to presume any proofing of the design was done and it wasn't just slapped together. But even then, shouldn't the printer have seen the error and said "Hey, is this really what you want to say?"

But then there's the issue of being edited, and losing your initial intent because either you've been too critical of your own choice of words, or someone else has come along and altered them to fit their own perspectives.

A good example of this, well known to some, is when J.R.R. Tolkein had his "elven" changed to "elfin" by a zealous editorial agent wishing to use correct English. I'm not prepared to be critical of such an agent by calling them over-zealous: the entire point to having an editor is to pick up on errors, assess how well this follows that, and generally just smooth out the kinks the author may not have picked up on themselves. Had this instance of "correction" not been re-corrected to reflect Tolkein's wholly intentional use of "elven", we might have had a completely different idea about what "elfin" means these days. As it is the former has a degree of sophistication to it, of ideals, of all the other stuff people writing of elves like to have their readers infer about their magical better-than-human race, and the former is relegated to usage as a descriptor for wee little things, cutesy curly-toed shoes with bells on and sometimes children. The way a person chooses language is far more than just about what they're trying to say, and very much about the image they're trying to create with the junction between implication and inference.

I myself am partial to using correct English. The trouble is, though, that British English and American English are often of enough difference that in choosing one, the benefits of the other are sacrificed. For instance: the verb "cancel". In American English, the preterite form of "cancel" is typically spelt "canceled", with one l; yet in British English it's "cancelled", with two ls. In neither case is the emphasis placed on the second syllable: an event is never cancel(l)ed, but cancel(l)ed - despite the fact that by doubling a consonant in such a way in English (among other languages) the stress is indicated to fall upon the syllable containing it. The same is true of "focus" - my mum tends to spell the past tense as "focussed", whereas I prefer the leaner "focused". Of course, the problem here may be that someone may interpret the pronunciation of "focused" to be less aligned to "focus" and more to "focuse", or even "focuze". On the other hand, if "focussed" needs a double-s to maintain the s-sound, why drop the second s at all? To be frank, I prefer British English. It's what I've been trained to use as my first language, and there are many things in American English which don't make sense to me. However, I can also see things in British English, like needless consonant doubling, which are of equal senselessness - and I can't just ignore them, either. I suppose, in that case, I choose a blend. Never shall you see an unnecessary ll or ss; but then nor will you ever see a z (which to me is a zed) used in place of an s. And, dependent on where you're from, you may have seen that I did use the British form of preterite - with the terminal e.

Speaking of uselessness: apostrophes to indicate plurals, in any instance, cause me to grind my metaphorical teeth. I've seen all sorts of catapostrophic (did you see what I did there?) misuse, and while the typical "paper's" or "number's" makes me shake my head and wonder what thought process led to that kind of typographic abomination (I also love hyperbole), what really gets to me are the following:

Decades with an apostrophe between the last number and the pluralising s ("1990's");
Acronyms, which technically should be written with a fullstop between the capital letters to indicate they stand for whole words themselves, followed by an apostrophe and the pluralising s ("ID's");
Words ending in s followed by an apostrophe but no pluralising s ("glass'");
Letters followed by an s with an apostrophe ("A's")
Others. So many others.

I should say there's a fair bit of responsibility that should be assigned to the it's/its pair: for a long time I didn't realise that the possessive didn't have an apostrophe at all, which on first glance is atypical of many possessives in English. Of course, it turns out that it actually isn't: yours, his, hers and theirs have no apostrophes either, yet are spelt correctly and indicate possession. But the confusion remains, because possessives using nouns and not pronouns, as a fair rule, require the apostrophe: "my brother's brother" becomes "his brother" when I substitute the pronoun for the noun. However, I stand by the claim that a little thought about why "glasses" is a simple plural noun and doesn't need an apostrophe and the last s taken away would mean that we, the people, would not then have to read such things as "glass'".

And maybe a little thought as to why a comma is needed in a sentence may lead to subclauses being opened and closed between two such marks, rather than a subclause being opened and never closed. For instance, the title of this post. So many people would write it like so: "Why communication isn't, or at least shouldn't be accidental." I've referenced this already when I touched upon using commas (badly) to break a single clause into two partial clauses that just hang there, incomplete. The issue is that sentences have clauses in them; commas can be used to separate the clauses into more readable fragments. But those fragments need to be readable as separable parent-child clauses that apply to a preceding piece of information and are clearly delineated from the original clause. In this case the over-arching clause is "Why communication isn't accidental"; the secondary clause is "or at least shouldn't be", and it applies directly to its parent as a separate modifier - not as blurred into it like some chimaeric parent-child blend.

And yet here I am, at the end of all of this, about to say something of heresy: do what you want to do with language. I don't at all mean be a total jerk and use the worst words you can just because you're "doing what you want", because regardless of how free you deem yourself to be in terms of communication, you're still responsible for any communication you engage in. What I'm saying is: learn the rules well enough to know what you're doing when you break them...and then go ahead and break them, as long as you can describe how you're breaking them and what your intent in doing so is. That's why puns work so well. That's why alliteration and certain neologisms or word-amalgamations are so fitting: because they're done with intent and show understanding and appreciation of the finer workings of language.

I quite like neologisms, actually. And puns. But the whole point is, words that are well-chosen may not even have to be actual words, provided they're still well-chosen. They serve a purpose. For instance, in the story I'm currently writing (in case you're interested), I'm debating whether to use "eventide" or not. The issue for me in this case is that to my eye the word is of the sea: the prominent portion is "tide", with "even" an adjective applied to indicate that it is neither high nor low. In reality "eventide" actually is an archaic way to say "evening" ("even" is also an archaic way to say "evening", seen in terms such as "evenstar", an old name for the planet Venus as seen from Earth) - but the inference I take from it is less one of dusk or twilight and more one of a time of day associated with the ebb and flow of the ocean. So I am tending towards "eventime", which is not a word, but is similar enough to be read as one and not at all without justification as a neologism. Even a single letter can make a difference, changing the entire focus of a word from one thing to another.

The whole point here wasn't actually to decry the terrible spelling and other textual errors that I see around me, but to say that language can be fun. And beautiful, too. It doesn't even have to follow rules, really, or at least, it doesn't have to follow them to the letter, as long as it makes an effort and when and where it doesn't follow the rules it has a reason for its foray away from them. It can't be accidental, and it shouldn't be just writers, copywriters, editors, designers or professionals who take communication seriously. It should be everyone. We should all be using language as a tool already made for us and bending it the way we want it to bend, rather than under- and misusing it because we don't quite understand how to use it to its fullest. Language isn't complex just because it can be, but because it has to be in order to express everything its users want, or might want, to use it to communicate. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It's all by intent and the way we use it should be too.