User:Rentwa/Soapbox/Rant

Poor English upsets me. Here are my current bugbears:


 * Using 'seek' to mean 'try'.
 * This is the sort of racy language that's common with politicians and certain sections of the media (by which I mean Radio 4). Jack Straw and John Humphrys are notable offenders. (I don't know which one was infected first, but I'm guessing it was Straw - remember when he kept saying he was 'minded' to do this thing or that?)


 * '...we did seek to resolve the Iraq crisis by peaceful means....those who seek to emulate his legacy of murder....the Conservatives seek to undermine that future...' Jack Straw to the Labour Party conference, 2003. Three times in one speech! Arsehole!


 * seek: to try to find, to look for


 * '''Using 'target' as a verb.
 * Although my OED gives 'n. & v.', this seems to have become current only recently. It's a difficult one to complain about since there's no single-word synonym (I can think of) which covers all the meanings the verb usage has come to have, eg.:


 * '...10 planes had been targeted...' Guardian article. Here 'targeted' is roughly synonymous with 'aimed at' or 'selected'.


 * 'Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, made inflation targeting the cornerstone of an independent Bank of England ...' Telegraph article. Here the sense is more 'focusing on' or 'looking into', but neither are appropriate for the first example, and 'aiming at' is not appropriate here.


 * So it's arguably a valid coinage. It's just that I want to kill people when I hear it..


 * 'Impact' isn't a verb either.
 * Use 'affect'.


 * 'Empower' isn't even a word...
 * This is what happens when the Left abandons revolutionary Marxism and adopts macrobiotic hippy twaddle (by which I mean Feminism) as its fundamental philosophy. I don't want to hear about this or that group of malingering cretins being 'empowered' to do this thing or that thing, I want to hear 'death to the capitalist running dogs and their imperialist lackeys' and similar jolly epithets.


 * '''Not knowing the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.
 * Americans can be excused - they presumably don't know any better, but the next English TV presenter who says '..meet with..' I'm going to stalk and bludgeon to death with Fowler.


 * Using a plural verb for a collective noun.
 * 'The govrnment are to blame.' We are only talking about one government, therefore 'The government is to blame.'


 * Using 'contemporary' to mean 'modern'.
 * Like the constable's evidence, this is typical of poorly educated people trying to sound clever ('contemporary' has more syllables and sounds more Latinate, after all). Although Wiktionary gives 'modern' as a simple synonym, my Concise Oxford (1995) does not. The word clearly means 'at the same time as' (literally 'with time') and has a more general meaning than 'modern'. If you mean modern, why not say 'modern'?


 * Using 'invariably' for 'usually'. 
 * The etymology should be even clearer! 'Invariably' means without variation i.e. always! Another favourite of politicians.


 * Not understanding 'diagnose'.
 * The subject of the verb 'to diagnose' is the physician, the object is the disease, not the patient: 'The doctor diagnosed the lurgi.' Not 'Mr. Smith was diagnosed with the lurgi.' Ugh!


 * 'Property' does not mean 'house'.
 * Always referring to houses as properties emphasises the commercial nature of home ownership - I think this is some kind of Thatcherite delerium...