Use the Language Correctly, Please

LET'S BAN THE USE OF                            PARTICULAR GRIPES

#29: KUDOS: Kudos is not the plural of kudo.  Kudos is a Greek word that originally meant fame of an almost legendary sort.  It migrated to the English language meaning credit for some achievement, which seems fine.  But it is singular and should be used with that in mind.  September 3, 2006.

#28: DROPPED ARTICLES: General Hayden refers to the C.I.A. as just "C.I.A.", without the definite article, and I now hear other Washingtonians doing the same, even including some of the folks at the otherwise literate National Public Radio.  Why?  To put it bluntly, this is wrong.  We do not refer to our country as "U.S.A." rather than "the U.S.A." and we shouldn't use this sloppy form of language with any other abbreviation, unless the first initial of the abbreviation makes the definite article redundant, as in "HMS Victory", or it's an acronym.  May 20, 2006.

#27: UNEXPLAINED CONDITIONALS: I'm baffled by the now almost universal use in the U.S. of the conditional tense where no condition appears to exist to justify it.  For example, it is now apparently standard practice to thank people conditionally, as in "I would like to thank Joe Smith for all his help."   The use of "would" suggests an unspoken condition, as in "I would like to thank Joe Smith for all his help but I'm not going to" and prompts the response, "What's stopping you?"  "I want to thank ....." is no better.  Just say "Thank you, Joe Smith, for all your help" and slip him the plain envelope with the cash.  November 23, 2005.

#26: PIN NUMBER: The letters PIN stand for Personal Identification Number.  To refer to a PIN number is, therefore, tautologous: just say PIN.  June 12, 2005.

#25: CENTENNIAL: Centennial is an adjective, not a noun.  The noun is centenary.   May 28, 2005.

#24: LIKE: No, I'm not going to complain about the over-use of like in teenage conversation, now regrettably aped by a lot of grown-up people who should know better.  It's the use of like instead of such as that's annoying me today.  As usual, it's journalists that do it.  They are continually saying things such as "Joe Bloggs hangs out at Elaine's with stars like Woody Allen".  This suggests that there are at least two stars out there who resemble Woody Allen in some way, which is hard to imagine.  What they meant to say is that this Bloggs chappie actually hangs out at Elaine's with the Woodster himself, plus a bunch of other folks of comparable luminosity but no particular similarity.  What they should have said, therefore, was "Joe Bloggs hangs out at Elaine's with stars such as Woody Allen."  Maybe I'm getting a tad pedantic here, but pedantry is my middle name: you expect it.  May 27, 2005.

#23: CONSUL AND COUNSEL: It's amazing that so many apparently intelligent, educated people persist in the belief that a consul is the same thing as a counsel and is, therefore, pronounced the same as counsel.  Even more bizarrely, consular and consulate get pronounced as if they were counselar and counselate, although there are, of course, no such words.  Let's be clear.  A consul is a diplomatic officer: the word comes from the Roman elected political official.  A counsel is a lawyer: the word comes from the Latin consulere, to consult, from which also comes consultant.  May 6, 2005.

#22: HISTORIC AND HISTORICAL: Sometimes one gets the impression from the news that historic events are happening daily.  This is unlikely.  Historical events happen daily: historic events are relatively rare.   Why?  Because an historical event is something that is incontrovertibly known to have happened but that is of no great significance, such as President Bush making a speech, while an historic event is something that not only happened but is also of great significance, such as President Bush resigning.  April 5, 2005.

#21: LIGHTED: An annoying variation on pleaded for pled crops up in the New York Times this week in the form of the phrase "a cool, well-lighted place".  The past participle of the verb to light is lit, not lighted.  And by the way, the hyphen is incorrect, too, unless this place is being lit by a well and I've never thought of a well as a particularly effective source of light.  Where does lighted come from?  What's next?  "I bighted my tongue" or "I fighted my opponent"?  This is more evidence of the deplorable decline in editing.  April 5, 2005.

#20: PRIMER: I just heard someone on NPR pronounce this word primmer.  Grrr.  If it were pronounced primmer, it would be spelt primmer.  What do they teach them in primary school?  Or is it now primmary school?  December 20, 2004.

#19: COHORT:  A cohort is not a companion or colleague.  This error apparently derives from a passing similarity between cohort and consort, which does mean a companion.  Originally a cohort was a unit of the Roman army, consisting of one tenth of a legion, or six centuria, or roughly 600 men.  Thence, not unreasonably, it came to mean any largish body of men.  A consort, on the other hand, is a companion, usually one who plays a subsidiary role in a relationship, like many of my readers.  Cohort - lots of people: consort - one person.  Got it?  Of course, dictionary editors, who have no standards, are now allowing this misuse, apparently on the grounds that, if enough people get something wrong, it must be right.  The only good news here is that nobody seems to think that a consort is the same thing as a cohort.  June 20, 2004.

#18: TROOPS:  A radio newsperson just said "At least five American troops died Saturday".  Grrr.  Individual members of the armed services or small groups of individual soldiers are not troops: they are soldiers, marines, or whatever; generically they are servicemen and servicewomen.  A troop is a military formation, used primarily in the cavalry (remember "F Troop"?), equivalent in size to a platoon: it has a plural form, troops.  The collective noun troops means a large body of soldiers of unspecified numbers, as in "We sent troops to Haiti".

#17: CEMENT:  I am tired of hearing journalists refer to cement buildings.  It would be really difficult to erect a building made of cement, because it would fall down as quickly as you could erect it.  That's because cement is a powder.  Now, if you mix it with sand and water, you get concrete.  Buildings are made of concrete, not cement.  Concrete buildings don't (generally) fall down.  Got it?  Since writing this, the "New Yorker" magazine has published an article explaining concrete to its readers.  One might have hoped that "New Yorker" readers were smart enough to have grasped the idea of concrete already, but apparently not.  Or maybe it was the editorial staff of the "New Yorker" that hadn't previously understood it: that seems more likely.

#16: HERO:  A hero is someone widely admired for his outstanding courage.  It's from the Greek for a legendary figure of outstanding strength or warlike ability.  Not everyone who wears a uniform is necessarily a hero.  The victim of an accident does not become a hero because of that misfortune.

#15: CRISIS:  A crisis is a turning-point, the critical (same root) point in a chain of events.  It's from the Greek for a decision.  A crisis cannot, therefore, by definition, go on for any period of time, as our politicians and journalists seem to think.  As far as Iraq is concerned, we've passed the crisis and now we have a continuing problem, although it's possible that there is another crisis to come.

#14: DARPA:  You've all heard about Admiral Poindexter's scary new enterprise, the Information Awareness Office of DARPA.  I invite you to visit the great admiral's web site at http://www.darpa.mil/iao/.  It would be hilarious if it wasn't so spooky.  The name, the motto, the official seal, the mission statement, are all a riot: it's as if Mad magazine had been asked to create a government agency.  But my reason for writing this paragraph is not that the Information Awareness Office is a joke and it will not survive any longer than did the Attorney-General's Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS).  It's because the Information Awareness Office's web site is the most egregious example of gobbledygook one could possibly ask for.  I've worked for DARPA and I know that there are people there who can speak English, but none of them appear to be in the Information Awareness Office.  Since writing this, the Information Awareness Office has, of course, been shut down and Admiral Poindexter has resigned in a huff, complaining that nobody understands him, poor baby.

#13: POEM: Excuse me, poets, but poem has two syllables too: if it only had one, then you'd be pronounced potes.