Plaints from a Petulant Pedant

I know that English, like all spoken languages, is mutable. The speakers determine, over time, expression, vowel placement and sound, consonant use, definition. But, knowing that, I mourn for some of the grace notes that I was taught were correct and that I no longer hear used.

For one, the use of few/fewer and less. The distinction between a numeric noun or group and a general one is vanishing, even on CBC and other bastions of good speech. “I hear less birdsong because there are fewer birds.’ Generic ‘birdsong’, no quantity. Numeric for ‘birds’ because they are countable. “I will have less of that noise in the back of the class, thank you.” Fewer than five turkeys survived the winter.”  Fewer people than formerly make this distinction.

And then there are those delightful verbs to lie and to lay. Mostly, to lay is used correctly in the present and past tenses. “The hen lays and egg. The duck laid an egg yesterday. Both of them have laid sporadically this year.” Got that? It is to lie that gets all messed up. “The fallen statue lies face up. It lay there yesterday. I think it must have lain there for longer than that.” When is the last time you heard someone use lain. You hear “He laid there (sometimes spelled layed) all night.” I used to introduce this concept to the Grade 9 classes by telling them that “You have to LAY something.” And then I would pause and wait for the boys to stop snickering. But, some of them at least remembered. Of course - “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

When I hear someone using ‘fulsome’ to describe a generously complete action or item – “He gave a fulsome report, leaving nothing out.” – it rattles me. I learned the word as denoting an insincere overabundance. “Fulsome praise” was too much, over the top, embarrassing. I once had a discussion about me described as “fulsome”. When I called the speaker on it, he assured me that all he had meant was that there had been a lot of it. But. This man was a writer and former English teacher and lecturer. He knew both meanings. And I knew which one he intended.

I have on my desk, tucked behind the computer monitor, Fowler’s English Usage, The Oxford Reference Dictionary, Dreyer’s English and the MLA Style Manual. If the Dreyer title is not familiar, Ben Dreyer was the Copy Chief at Random House for many years and so you might be more familiar with the Penguin Style and Usage title.

And I still get things wrong on a regular basis. Mutable, right?