By Wil Taylor
For the Chippewa Valley Post
I love language. Specifically, I love words. More specifically, I love English words.
Before one of my limey friends jumps on me with accusation of butchering the Queen’s English (the subject of a future essay), I will qualify that by saying I love American English.
And so it is that I have always harbored a desire to coin a word. I have candidates. The word “frolleague” for example. I have been using this term for friends with whom I work for years but for which there is no current entry in WikiDictionary.
If future language sleuths for the Oxford English Dictionary will have access to old Facebook posts, they will learn that I first used this term in 2009, and then perhaps I’ll have truly ascended to word nerd heaven.
My enthusiasm for language and words probably traces to growing up in a household where language was viewed as a badge of education. This badge signified an elevation above country talk (Dad), and ethnicity (Mum).
In Dad’s case, the casual grammar breaches that were customary where he grew up in southern Pennsylvania, left him regarding the contraction “ain’t” as being as profane as any cuss word. “Ain’t’s NOT a word” was his response, and it was delivered with more disapproval than any other scold.
In Mum’s case, she was taunted with ethnic slurs as a child of Italian immigrants, so no kid of hers was going to stand out as “less than” because of the way they talked. Both parents grew up in the early 1900s, so they raised their children in an age of assimilation. This emphasis on assimilation has largely gone out of fashion, for better or worse.
One of the main mechanisms for teaching proper grammar to the children in our household was friendly competition. If I misspoke, one of my siblings would leap to correct me like a lion on a weak antelope. And there was real goading and pride to be earned and lost in the interaction.
To this day, I have the perennial stumper of lay vs. lie branded into my memory. Given the extent to which it is misused by most, this is more of a curse than a blessing. Sadly (though not to those around me), I have lately come to learn that most feel that correcting anyone who has not given you explicit permission to do so is quite rude. So much for my pedantry.
But whether you correct or not, what is “correct?” An even more painful recent realization of mine concerns the distinction between prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics.
Should rules of grammar and usage determine right from wrong (prescriptive) or should they reflect how language is actually used by real speakers (descriptive)? As a rule follower (and pedant), I really want the former. But as a descriptive scientist, I can readily comprehend the latter.
This does not leave me any better equipped emotionally to accept, for example, that my beloved ability to know in an instant if someone has used “lay” when they should have used “lie” will eventually be rendered moot. That could happen when these terms are widely used so interchangeably that dictionaries will say either one is acceptable. It will be like losing a superpower.
So, dear reader, what is your favorite word? Have you ever coined one? What new words do we need?
Respond to Wil Taylor’s questions about “Words” by emailing cvpostwi@gmail.com.