Stumbled across this article through a library listserv and was, of course, intrigued by it. As writing is a craft many of us enjoy I was compelled to share it with you all, and hope you don't eschew it (did I even use that correctly??).

Okay, I'll stop. Here's the link:

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/seven-deadly-words-of-book-reviewing/

Hey, I resemble that remark!

I frequently use "crafted," although I gather not in the same sense that the blogger b*tches about. I also use "eschew" far more frequently than the average bear. Both are perfectly good words, especially "craft," which to me connotes something more meticulous and painstaking than mere "creation." That's the beauty of a language with multiple synonyms.

The rest of the words are ones I rarely see in real reviews. Seems to me that they're the kind of telltale buzzwords that appear in blurbs on the covers of direct-to-paperback novels, or vanity press books where friends of the author are attempting to appear "hoity-toity." Or is hoity-toity a forbidden adjective, too; and I'm supposed to use "pompous" since more people know what it means?

Deliver me from people who quote Fowler without understanding him.

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rex (who used limn - correctly - in his thesis; which was most assuredly not a book review)

like people with a good vocabulary and the taste to use it without excess. A bunch of synonyms is far better than the same two words used over and over and over again.

There is nothing wrong with knowing words; people ashamed of that are barking up the tree of conformity.

Oh, yeah, no doubt that English is a living language - just look at all of the words that OED and other dictionaries add each year. Of course, what you're talking about - shift in meaning because of misunderstanding - is a bit more like a virus than healthy growth, at least IMHO But, then, I admit to being fairly prescriptivist.

One need only watch the daily and Sunday morning politico-business talk shows to get a feeling for the next semantic shift (or, I suppose, "Entertainment Tonight," which I don't think I've ever watched). Those are where the verbed nouns - "impacted," "prioritized" - enter the argot, as well as buzzwords like the misuse of "absolutely" and buzzphrases such as "irrational exuberance." Some of those talking heads and other spinmeisters are extremely good at exploiting the general public's unfamiliarity with words. That's how previously neutral words are co-opted by political movements and become loaded terms: take "values," for example. But I digress...

Part of the weakness of linguistic descriptivism - at least to those of us who are more prescriptivist - is the attitude that, "it's what people say, so it's now part of the language." That's how we lose perfectly good terminology: I had a discussion with someone just recently about "jerry-rigged" vs. "jury-rigged." The etymology of the word is from sailing, where a "jury rig" is a sort of ad hoc setup (I know nothing of sailing, mind you) to replace damaged rigging, but since the term seems slightly pejorative the pronunciation and spelling shifted to "jerry-rigged" during WWII because Germans were called "jerries" (and there was confusion with the term "jerry-built," which means of shoddy manufacture). The upshot? a term that meant "improvised" - one might even say admiringly, "McGyvered" - now means "crappy" to most people, who mispronounce it to boot.

Yes, a living language; but evolving inefficiently sometimes.

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rex

...or "begging the question" :) I've actually never heard the term "jerry rigging" personally (or at least not consciously) and have always thought of the term "jury rigging" as meaning essentially a temporary fix to something done on the spot but not meant to last forever.

A friend of mine and I had a discussion a while back about the term "modern" and whether it actually has relevance now. It seems an odd term that is somewhat stranded right now. Sometimes it seems used as the buzzword of the moment but when I think of it as a term it generally means a technological shift past outhouses and the like. Also the whole "Moderns" thing resonates but as far as technology goes it lacks meaning with tech shifting so quickly nowadays.

Personally I like and don't like the living language deal. I tend to like standardized spelling to some degree. I prefer British punctuation to a degree (funny funny:) ). I also like the fact that English can shift words from pretty much any language (including computerspeak) wholesale depending on need or desires of the moment. I think translating names (aside from character differences) is silly though (for some reason--given my own name;) ) but can understand it to some degree with unpronounceable sounds. I think that bastardizing and ruining perfectly good words is silly though but slowly changing them isn't that big a deal.

Ander