Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022
Pet peeves
The stuff in the back
I’ve never met a writer or other word person who didn’t have a pocketful of language peeves—words or uses of words that drive a normally reasonable person into unreasonable outbursts of anger and irritation, if not fits of rage—and I doubt I’d trust anyone anyway who denied having a few of these bugaboos stashed away somewhere.
Everyone’s pet peeves are different. The important thing to remember is that your own pet peeves reflect sensible preferences based on a refined appreciation of the music and meaning of the English language, and that everyone else’s are the products of diseased minds.
OK, let’s roll.
AGGRAVATE
If you use “aggravate” to mean not “make a bad thing worse” but “annoy intensely,” though it has for centuries been used thus, you will irritate a goodly number of people, so you might well stick, in such cases, with “irritate.” If “irritate” bores or otherwise aggravates you, use of one of its synonyms—among them “annoy,” “exasperate,” and, my favorite, “vex”—and save yourself the aggravation.
ANXIOUS
The utterly common and exceptionally long-established use of “anxious” to describe anticipation of a happy sort makes some people anxious, and not in a good way. As an anxious type myself, I don’t think it’s worth the kerfuffle. I reserve “anxious” for things I’m nervously battening down the hatches over and use “eager” to express, well, eagerness. That said, “anxious” comes in handy for things you’re excited about that are nonetheless spawning stomach butterflies. A first date, say.
ARTISANAL
As can happen with any word that is suddenly, explosively ubiquitous, “artisanal,” when used to refer to things made by hand for which you pay an arm and a leg, has quickly devolved from a selling point to an object of eye-rolling derision. Not being in the pickle, beer, or soap business, I rarely encounter it professionally, but if you’re on the verge of using it, you might want to think twice. Then thrice.*1
ASK
The nouning of the verb “ask”—“That’s a big ask,” “What’s the ask on this?”—makes me chortle appreciatively, though I can’t help but note that “request” is a perfectly charming word as either noun or verb. Verb-to-noun transformations—“nominalization” is the formal term for the process—can grate as well as amuse, as can many of the other attempts, often hailing from the worlds of business and academia, to gussy up shopworn ideas by replacing conventional language with overreaching—and arguably unnecessary—coinages.*2
BASED OFF OF
No. Just no. The inarguably correct phrase is “based on.”
BEGS THE QUESTION
When used to mean “raises the question,” this is not just a pet peeve; it’s a nuclear threat. So duck and cover and listen up.
Begging the question, as the term is traditionally understood, is a logical fallacy in which someone argues for the legitimacy of a conclusion by citing as evidence the very thing they’re trying to prove in the first place. Circular reasoning, that is. To assert, say, that vegetables are good for you because eating them makes you healthy or that I am a first-rate copy editor because clearly my copyediting improves other people’s prose is to beg the question.
Except hardly anyone recognizes, much less uses, “begs the question” for that sort of thing anymore. The phrase has been overwhelmingly repurposed to mean “leads to an inevitable query,” as in, “The undeniable failure of five successive big-budget special-effects-laden films begs the question, Is the era of the blockbuster over?”*3
People who are in the business of hating the relatively new-fashioned use of “begs the question” hate it vehemently, and they hate it loudly. Unfortunately, subbing in “raises the question” or “inspires the query” or any number of other phrasings fools no one; one can always detect the deleted “begs the question.”
BEMUSED
The increasing use of “bemused” to mean “wryly, winkingly amused” rather than “bothered and bewildered” is going to—sooner rather than later, I fear—render the word meaningless and useless, and that’s too bad; it’s a good word. My own never-say-die attitude toward preserving “bemusement” to mean perplexity, and only that, is beginning to give me that General Custer vibe.
CENTERED AROUND
Even as a spatially challenged person who doodled and dozed his way through geography class, I recognize that “centered around” doesn’t make any sense, so I will always opt for “centered on” or “revolved around.” You should too.
CHOMPING AT THE BIT
Yes, it’s traditionally “champing at the bit.” Yes, many people now write “chomping,” likely because the word “champing” is unfamiliar to them. In that “champing” and “chomping” are as virtually indistinguishable in meaning as they are in spelling, the condemnation of “chomping” strikes me as trifling.
CLICHÉ
It’s a perfectly lovely noun. As an adjective, it’s annoying. You can afford the extra letter in “clichéd.” Use it.
COMPRISE
I confess: I can barely remember which is the right way to use this word and which the wrong way, so every time I cross paths with it—or am tempted to use it—I stop to look it up.
“The English alphabet comprises twenty-six letters.” This is correct.
“Twenty-six letters compose the English alphabet.” This is also correct, though “make up” would sound a bit less stilted than “compose,” don’t you think?
“The English alphabet is comprised of twenty-six letters.” Cue the sirens, because here come the grammar cops.
Use plain “comprise” to mean “made up of” and you’re on safe ground. But as soon as you’re about to attach the word “of” to the word “comprise,” raise your hands to the sky and edit yourself. Once you’ve lowered your hands.
COULD CARE LESS
Use this phrase at your own peril to express utter indifference, because it inspires, from many, furious condemnation. (It’s couldn’t care less, people insist, because otherwise aren’t you saying you do care? Logical but not inarguable.) I appreciate its indirect sarcasm, and the more people hate on it, the more apt I am to use it.
DATA
It’s a plural, it’s a singular, it’s a breath mint, it’s a dessert topping.
The data supports the consensus that “data” is popularly used as a singular noun, and it’s worth neither fussing over this nor raising the existence of the word “datum.”
Move on already.
DECIMATE
Because the Latin root of this word is decem, meaning “ten,” some people would use “decimate” only to describe the punishment by death of one in ten—not one in nine, not one in eleven—mutinous soldiers.
Other people would use it to describe, generally, destruction.
The latter group certainly gets more use out of the word.
DIFFERENT THAN
There’s nothing wrong with “different than,” and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
If you say “different to,” you’re likely a Brit, and that’s OK too.
DISINTERESTED
I’d be happier if you’d restrict your use of “disinterested” to suggest impartiality and, when speaking of lack of interest, make use of the handy “uninterested.” I don’t think that’s asking a lot.
EPICENTER
Strictly speaking, an epicenter is the place on the earth’s surface directly above the place where an earthquake is occurring.
Less strictly speaking, an epicenter is a hub of activity, often but not always unhappy or unfortunate activity.
You’re on relatively safe metaphorical ground referring to, say, the epicenter of a plague; a reference to Paris as the epicenter of classic cooking may not sit well on some stomachs.
I myself don’t care much for fanciful uses of “epicenter,” mostly because I think “center” does the job just fine.
FACTOID
If you use the word “factoid” to refer to a bite-size nugget of authentic information of the sort you’ll find in a listicle,*4 you’ll sadden those of us who hold to the word’s original meaning: According to the writer Norman Mailer, who should certainly know because he was the one who invented the word in the first place, factoids are “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” That the Great Wall of China is visible from the Moon is a factoid, as are the existence of George Washington’s wooden teeth, the nationwide panic caused by Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast, and the execution by burning at the stake of Salem’s condemned witches.*5
FEWER THAN/LESS THAN
The strict—and, really, not all that hard to remember—differentiation is that “fewer than” is applied to countable objects (fewer bottles of beer on the wall) and “less than” to what we call exclusively singular nouns (less happiness, less quality) and mass nouns (fewer chips, less guacamole).
Except—and there’s always an “except,” isn’t there—you should use “less than” in discussions of distance (less than five hundred miles) and time (completing a test in less than sixty minutes—if you’re not already saying “in under sixty minutes,” which you probably are, and go ahead). And you likely use “less than” in discussions of money and weight: “I have less than two hundred dollars” or “I weigh less than two hundred pounds” or “a country that’s gone to the dogs in less than five months,” because it’s not really the individual months you’re interested in, but the swiftness of the decline.
To people who object to supermarket express-lane signs reading 10 ITEMS OR LESS: On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand, get a hobby. Maybe flower arranging, or scrapbooking.
FIRSTLY, SECONDLY, THIRDLY
Like nails on a blackboard. Do you have blackboards anymore? OK, then…like feedback over a microphone.
If you decline to write “firstly,” “secondly,” and “thirdly” in favor of “first,” “second,” and “third,” not only are you saving letters, but you can tell all your friends about this amazing thing called a flat adverb—an adverb that matches in form its sibling adjective, notably doesn’t end in “-ly,” and is 100 percent correct, which is why we’re allowed to say “Sleep tight,” “Drive safe,” and “Take it easy.” Though not in that order.
FOR ALL INTENSIVE PURPOSES
I didn’t intend to include “for all intensive purposes” on this list because I’ve never, so far as I can recall, encountered anyone saying or writing it except as a joke about people saying or writing “for all intensive purposes.” But it’s out there (and has been since the 1950s), and it turns up intermittently in print.
It’s “for all intents and purposes.” It makes sense if you think about it: What would an “intensive purpose” be, anyway?
FORTUITOUS
As to the use of “fortuitous” to mean fortunate or favorable, it’s universally acceptable so long as the good fortune or favor is accidental, because that’s what “fortuitous” means: by chance (though, in its original sense, with no guarantee of a happy ending). If you achieve something good by the sweat of your brow, find a word that better honors your achievement.
FULSOME
A word that over the centuries has picked up more meanings than are good for it, or for you: among them abundant, generous, overgenerous, excessive, offensive, and stench-ridden. (It can also be applied to the sort of interior decorating taste that leans toward gilt and gold-plated everything, though the best word for that sort of thing remains the Yiddish word ungapatchka.) Though you may be tempted to apply “fulsome” unambiguously positively, if you allude to a “fulsome expression of praise,” a hefty chunk of your audience will have visions of shameless brown-nosing dancing in their heads. So just skip it.
GIFT (AS A VERB)
If you’re bored with “bestow,” “proffer,” “award,” “hand out,” “hand over,” or any of the other excellent verbs the English language has come up with over the years to describe the act of giving a person a thing, by all means make use of “gift,” which I wouldn’t even consider describing as odious because I’m not that sort of person and because, I assure you, many other people are already lined up eagerly to do so.*6
GROW (TO MEAN “BUILD”)
You can’t argue, as some people attempt to do, that you can’t properly use the phrase “grow a business” (rather, that is, than “build a business”) because “grow” is only an intransitive verb (the sort that doesn’t take an object). Why not? Because it is also, or at least can be, a transitive verb, as you’ll surely note as you grow dahlias or a mustache.
You are free, though, to dislike such bureaucratese phrases as “grow the economy” because they are, to use the technical term, icky.
HOPEFULLY
If you can live with “There was a terrible car accident; thankfully, no one was hurt,” you can certainly live with “Tomorrow’s weather forecast is favorable; hopefully, we’ll leave on time.” Sticklers will insist that what you’re really saying is “We will leave on time with hope” and that you should instead say “I’m hopeful that we’ll leave on time.”
“Thankfully” and “hopefully” are, in these uses, disjunct adverbs, meaning that they modify not any particular action in the sentence (as they would in, say, “she thankfully received the gift” or “he hopefully approached his boss for a raise”) but the overall mood of the speaker of the sentence (or simply the sentence itself).
I’m not sure how “hopefully,” among all such disjunct usages, got singled out for abuse, but it’s unfair.
By the way, you may recognize the use of a disjunct adverb in one of the most famous lines ever delivered in a movie: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Ahem.
ICONIC
A word whose overuse has rendered it as dull and meaningless as “famous.” Moreover, while “famous” is at least applied to people who are at least reasonably celebrated and widely recognized, “iconic” seems lately to be desperately applied to people who are barely even well known. It should be used to denote entities of singular importance.
IMPACT (AS A VERB)
The use of the verb “impact,” in the sense of “affect,” when “affect” might be perfectly appropriate and sufficient, is a true scream inducer. You may already be screaming.
I don’t necessarily hold with the notion that the verb “impact” should never be used for anything less, um, impactful than an asteroid wiping out the dinosaur population, but do try to reserve it for big-ticket items.
IMPACTFUL
Yet another of those words that carry that unmistakable whiff of business-speak, and it’s not, to my nose, a pleasant scent. If everyone stopped using it, I bet no one would miss it.
INVITE (AS A NOUN)
If your life expectancy is so limited that you don’t have the time to issue an invitation, you might not be up to throwing that party.
IRONY
Funniness is not irony. Coincidence is not irony. Weirdness is not irony. Rain on your wedding day is not irony. Irony is irony: there’s a disconnect between what’s happening and what should be happening, or what’s said and what’s interpreted. If I tell you I went to the bank specifically to make sure my money was safe and was subsequently held up at gunpoint, that’s irony.
IRREGARDLESS
This grim mash-up of “irrespective” and “regardless” is wholly unnecessary. Plus—and don’t pretend otherwise—you know you use it only to irritate people.
LITERALLY
A respectable word that has been distorted into the Intensifier to End All Intensifiers. No, you did not literally die laughing. No, I don’t care that all your cool friends use “literally” that way. Are all your friends literally rolling on the floor laughing? I doubt it.
MORE THAN/OVER
This distinction, specifically insofar as counting is concerned, is less controversial than that between “less than” and “fewer than,” mostly because so few people observe it, and also because you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the word biz willing to defend it. So whether a book is over six hundred pages long or more than six hundred pages long, or whether little Jimmy is suddenly more than six feet tall or suddenly over six feet tall…Do as you like. It’s nothing to get worked up more than.
NAUSEATED (VS. NAUSEOUS)
I don’t think I knew till I was well beyond my college years that there was even such a word as “nauseated.” On those occasions when I was about to heave, I was content to be nauseous. Eventually I learned the traditional differentiation between “nauseous”—causing nausea—and “nauseated”—preparing to heave—but it was too late for me to mend my ways, so I’m still happy, as it were, to be nauseous.
NONPLUSSED
So then, “nonplussed.” To be nonplussed is to be confused, startled, at a loss for words. Lately the word’s devolved into a synonym for relaxed, cool as a cucumber, chill, and that’s a problem. How has this come to be? Presumably the “plussed” part strikes some eyes/ears as meaning “excited,” so the “non” part seems to turn that on its head, and there you have “nonplussed” serving as its own antonym.
ON ACCIDENT
Yes, it’s “on purpose.” No, it’s not “on accident.” It’s “by accident.”
PASS AWAY
In conversation with a bereaved relative, you might, I suppose, refer to someone having passed away or passed. In straightforward writing, people die.
PENULTIMATE
“Penultimate” is not a fancy word for “ultimate.” It does not mean “like totally ultimate, bro.” It means “the thing before the last thing,” or the next-to-last thing.
PERUSE
I’ve given up on “peruse,” because a word that’s used to mean both “read thoroughly and carefully” and “glance at cursorily” is as close to useless as a word can be.*7
PLETHORA
People who use “plethora” to describe something of which there’s too much—it started out in English as the name of a condition involving an overabundance of blood—sneer grimly at those who use it simply (and positively) to mean “a lot of something.” Either way, it’s fun to say.
REFERENCE (AS A VERB)
You can just say “refer to.”
RESIDE
You mean “live”? For some reason, you’ll see this word a lot if you read the About the Authors at the back of books or on the flaps. I think using “resides” rather than “lives” tells you a lot about the author.
’ROUND
If she’s approachin’ by way of circumnavigatin’ a mountain, she’s comin’ round it, and one can do nicely without an apostrophe before that r. I’m talking to you, people who like to write “ ’til” or, worse, “ ’till.” (It’s till, please.)
STEP FOOT IN
For your own safety, I’m telling you, just say “set foot in.” You’ll live longer.
’TIL
Once again, for the people in the cheap seats: “Till” is a word: till the cows come home. “Until” is a word: until the cows come home. “Till” is an older word than “until.” They both mean the same thing. There’s no justification whatsoever for “ ’til.”
TRY AND
If you try and do something, someone will immediately tell you to try to do it, so you might as well just try to do it so no one will yell at you.
UTILIZE
You can haul out “utilize” when you’re speaking of making particularly good use of something, as in utilizing facts and figures to project a company’s future earnings, or using something in an unconventional fashion, as in utilizing a key to open a bottle of Coca-Cola. Otherwise all you really need is “use.”
VERY UNIQUE
In the 1906 edition of The King’s English, coauthors and brothers Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler declared—and they were neither the first nor the last people to so declare—“A thing is unique, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique.”
I will allow that something can be virtually unique but can’t be more than—not very, not especially, not really—unique.
You might as well hang a KICK ME sign on your writing.*8
SKIP NOTES
*1 This would have been the perfect place for a snickering reference to Brooklyn hipsters, but snickering references to Brooklyn hipsters are trite and tired, so I refrain. By the way, the rhetorical trick of referring to something by denying that you’re referring to it is called apophasis. As in “Did you see her shirt? I won’t even mention the skintight purple snakeskin pants.” It’s not as subtle as people pretend it is.
*2 Speaking out of the other side of my face, I might also argue that if you’re not making up words every now and then, you’re not doing your job. A brilliant man named Bertrand Russell, an intellectual jack-of-all-trades, wrote, “Language serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” “Nouning,” by the bye, is not one of mine. It’s out there already.
*3 “Begs the question” has also taken on a part-time job to mean “evades the question,” but I confront that vastly less frequently.
*4 I love “listicle.” If a coinage truly captures a concept for which no existing word will do, if it truly brings something fresh to the table, I say let it pull up a chair and make itself comfortable.
*5 Washington’s dentures were made of ivory, metal, and teeth taken from animals and from other humans, including enslaved people; nah, it didn’t; and (a) they weren’t witches, and (b) they were hanged.
*6 “Regift,” on the other hand, is a gorgeous coinage because it does something no other word can properly do.
*7 There are words called contranyms, or Januses, that also mean their opposite: dust (to sprinkle powder on OR to remove powder from), cleave (cling to OR separate from), trim (cut from OR add to). English is just cruel sometimes.
*8 For other things that will render you kickable, see Chapter 11.