honorary auditory horrors.
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English being a mutt of a language, it's not
surprising that it's full of inconsistencies and exceptions to
rules. While it was certainly never destined to be as
elegant-sounding as, say, Italian or French, English does have its
charms. This is why certain obnoxious practices that have
insinuated their way
into common use are as offensive to the ear as an icepick.
First off, there are the people who just don't know how to handle a silent h that isn't silent, like in "an historic occasion." Newscasters seem to be especially guilty of this one, perhaps in a sophomoric attempt to sound sophisticated. The whole point of having both a and an is to make it sound right, so you don't have two vowels back-to-back. So, here it is, once and for all: if you're going to use the an, you don't get to use the h. It's that simple. It's an honor, but a horrible mistake. Get it? Every once in a while you find someone who actually does make the h silent in historical, in which case the an is correct; if you're going to do that, though, you should start spelling it that way so you don't ruin my eyes as well: "It's an onor to be here on this istoric occasion..." er, maybe not. Another one that drives me nuts is subject-verb agreement when the subject is made up of multiple entities. Rolling Stone is a major offender here - not that Rolling Stone isn't offensive for lots of other reasons - but on the rare occasion when I flip through an issue, I inevitably have to pick through an awkward line like "Radiohead were in the studio for a month." Really guys, it's okay to admit that these five people constitute a single entity. Radiohead is a band, singular. Please, please, it's either "Radiohead was" or "the members of Radiohead were." Honestly, those three extra words aren't going to push you over your space limit, no matter what your editor says. Just shrink that Calvin Klein add by a tenth of a percent and it will all fit. Promise. Interestingly, I don't notice this practice in other forms of journalism...you don't hear Dan Rather saying "The army are experiencing resistance in Iraq." Someone from Rolling Stone would probably counter with "Oh yeah? Well what about someone like The Strokes? You wouldn't say 'The Strokes is on tour,' would you?" Well, no, of course not. All I'm saying is a little flexibility when dealing with this sort of inconstancy just makes it sound better. (Like Kurt Cobain said, corporate magazines still suck.) One last nuisance that comes up often for me is the infuriatingly plural data. Technically, datum is singular, and multiple datums are data, plural. Thus, "the data show a trend," not "the data shows a trend." To get around this one, I've started using "the data set" to refer to my collection of data points as a singular entity. A compromise, to be sure, but at least a workable solution. It could be a awful lot worse, an horror show of a ugly sort. And I'm sure Radiohead agree. |