Transitory Transitives
Oct. 31st, 2012 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmThe ability to turn almost any part of speech into a verb is one of the glories of English, but it can be quite distracting. Take my desultory skimming of the internet this morning. Yes, they've discovered a Beowulf-style feasting hall under a village green in Kent, but I'm fixated on the phrase, "the ability to own and upkeep a horse". Yes, Mitt Romney has told porkies about Chrysler moving Jeep production to China, but I'm hung up on the image of "the Toledo plant shuttered and its more than 3,500 workers idled".
Each country's euphemism for redundancy says something about its culture. In the USA, it appears, workers are "idled" - a loaded term recalling the country's Puritan roots and the kinds of hands that the Devil makes work for. Here in the UK, people are "let go" - which sounds suitably passive aggressive, almost (and especially if done to the backing of Engelbert Humperdinck) as if it were done at the employees' instigation. And in France, of course, they use a culinary metaphor: firms are dégraissé. Bon appetit.
Okay, it's a lighter-than-air theory. That's why I float it.
Each country's euphemism for redundancy says something about its culture. In the USA, it appears, workers are "idled" - a loaded term recalling the country's Puritan roots and the kinds of hands that the Devil makes work for. Here in the UK, people are "let go" - which sounds suitably passive aggressive, almost (and especially if done to the backing of Engelbert Humperdinck) as if it were done at the employees' instigation. And in France, of course, they use a culinary metaphor: firms are dégraissé. Bon appetit.
Okay, it's a lighter-than-air theory. That's why I float it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 09:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 04:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 04:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 10:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 12:24 pm (UTC)In the US, when you're fired the person whose job it is to fire you says, "I'm sorry but it looks like we're going to have to let you go." Which if only Pharaoh had said to Moses!
My pet peeves are the verbings of impact and reference. I don't mind contact though my mother does. She also hates prey as an adjective ("I was as prey to a tendency to fail to notice the before-referenced lion and how it could impact herd morale as the next gazelle"), and has managed to induce a similar allergy in me. Also to the massing of attributive nouns ("herd morale").
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 01:03 pm (UTC)I try to cultivate equanimity regarding new usages, though not always successfully. Of course, I would never use "myriad" as an adjective, but I'm reconciled to the fact that it is on the way to becoming one. It's the way of the world, and language is a phenomenon of the world, a creature of the flux - much as we might like it resemble the account in the Cratylus. So, I've no problem at all with "impact" - because, after all, what would you say instead? "Affect"? But that too was a noun before it was an adjective.
"Prey" is an interesting one. I'm not sure that "the gazelle is prey to the lion" is an adjectival use at all: maybe it's more like "Soldiers are cannon-fodder to generals". However, from that kind of phrase the segue into a full adjectival use is almost inevitable.
The one thing I do jib at is usages that reduce the range of available shades of meaning. Thus the tendency to use "refute" to mean "deny", or "infer" to mean "imply", both irritate me.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 01:14 pm (UTC)Refute for rebut is awful in our political and critical discourse. When a newspaper tells me that Romney has refuted a charge made by Obama, and he hasn't, well that's a serious derogation of duty towards clarity and truth.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-06 08:01 am (UTC)These are dark times for the Western world.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 04:05 pm (UTC)That is not correct.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 06:06 pm (UTC)Would "maintain" a horse be acceptable usage? It sounds a little funny. Or just strike the "own" and say "keep a horse."
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-01 01:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-01 02:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-31 06:03 pm (UTC)We use both "let go" and "fire," but they mean different things -- if you have your job taken away due to some specific reason you supposedly weren't doing it right, that's being fired, while being "let go" implies they couldn't afford to keep you on, nothing personal. (Anyone else remember Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer protesting indignantly that he was not fired, he was let go?)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-01 02:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-01 09:40 pm (UTC)