Here is my admittedly incomplete list of popular offenses against the English language. Please join me in a moment of silence in honor of the part of the language that has died today (sigh).
"Very fraught"
"very unique"
"are key" for "are very crucially important"
"equally as" for "equally"
"these ones" for "these"
"He was looking for a high quality of beer" for "He was looking for a high quality beer," where what he is looking for is a beer of a certain kind, rather than a quality of a certain kind.
"wanna go and get some beers?" as opposed to "wanna go and get some beer?"
"he was too good of a fellow" in which the "of" is superfluous.
"Begs the question" (for "raises the ..")
"graphic" for "explicit" or "disturbing"
"Impact" as verb
"Access" as verb
"critique" as verb
tone of voice suggesting a sequence of examples where there is only one
"necessarily" thrown in as an emphasizer
"Hopefully"
"and whatnot" in place of "and so on" or "etc"
"garnished" for "garnisheed"
"mum" or "mom" and "dad" in place of mother and father
"scary" in place of frightening
"I"/"me" confusions
"infer"/"imply" confusions
"went" in place of "said"
"he was like" followed some verbal expression
"My name is Trooper Jones" for "I am Trooper Jones"
"I'm not sure" for "I don't know"
"us" or "we" instead of "I" or "me"
"could care less" for "couldn't care less"
"even" as in "don't even get me started" -- What does "even" do here? This usage presumes a tacit minimum that has not been reached in order to make sense, but it is frequently used as an emphasizer where no such minimum exists
"literally" as an emphasizer when it is not being contrasted with "figuratively" ("it was literally three inches long")
"nauseous"/"nauseating" confusion
"irregardless of"
I think you are correct on many or most of these; however, some of them are acceptable to me. Impact and Access may not originally have been verbs, but clearly they have evolved to be. Webster recognizes this, even if Oxford does not. To a certain extent, I think we have to allow for the evolution of the language, especially one as malleable as English. For example, sometimes it just sounds awful when you don't split the infinitive - what would Star Trek have been had Captain Kirk said "to go boldly where no man has gone before"
ReplyDeleteAsher
We can't let ourselves be bullied into accepting just any old changes, can we? If we did, we'd keep the split infinitive, but also add politically correct verbiage. How would you like, "to boldly go where no person has gone before"? Yecchhhh!
ReplyDeleteI heard somewhere that the rule against split infinitives was a prescriptive rule imposed upon English by a scholar with a particular zeal for Latin, and that prior to that, it was perfectly proper to split them in English. Similarly, an "outtake" is something that someone takes out, an intake is something that takes something in. If you hold something up, that thing is upheld. Parts of single words are separated and rearranged quite frequently in English, and this is even more marked in German, which is part of the same group of languages. Given that the infinitive is already two words, it makes sense that it sounds natural to split it.
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