Pissed Off at Giraffes

Let us hone in on the living language.

A striking group of giraffes congregates on a dirt track in the Serengeti, Tanzania, set against a backdrop of open plains and scattered acacia trees. Nobody is pissed.

Ha! See what I did there? It’s not “hone in.” It’s “home in,” like a pigeon or a tracking device. “Hone” means to bring to a keen edge, like with a knife sharpener.

The above paragraph will be true for about another five minutes. The expression has been misused by so many for so long that soon, like divorce and wearing sneakers to work, it will be perfectly acceptable. Just FYI, grammar Nazis. Words are not guaranteed a 1,000-year Reich.

This is what I think. In fact, the rejection of prescriptivism is the guiding ethos of Lexicon Valley, a 15-year-old podcast I co-cost with Mike Vuolo. Institutionally, we look down our noses at the tiresome pedants who look down their noses when words, punctuation and grammar fail to hew to the high standards of their youth. It’s as if your suspenders-wearing Grampa were constantly denouncing belts.

Language evolves — or should I say “mutates” — over time. That’s how, for example, “nice” gradually transformed from the Latin necius, which means “ignorant” or “foolish,” to its current meaning of kind, pleasant and good. Along the way, it was a synonym for “timid,” then “fussy,” and then “precise” before settling a couple of centuries ago into a synonym for Tom Hanks. No matter how the ancient Romans might have felt about it.

In 2011, in an outbreak of linguistic norovirus, millions of English speakers shit themselves when the Oxford English Dictionary acknowledged “figuratively” as a synonym for “literally” — a concession to real-world usage as ironic as it was dispiriting. Doesn’t that use of “literally” literally undermine the reason for dictionaries themselves? If “literally” can be meant as “figuratively,” what is the purpose of any literal definition? It was like opposing mirrors, or Orwellian Newspeak.

No lives were lost, however. And how upset can you be when democracy reigns?

That’s why “ain’t” is in the dictionary. Though it has roots going back to the 17th century, it was long haughtily dismissed as so vulgar and downmarket that one simply mustn’t lower oneself to using it, must one? But it’s a perfectly capable and universally understood contraction, and try as they did for 350 years to eradicate it, the pedants failed. Because so many people talk that way. Actual human usage is like a steady dripping of water that eventually carves a ravine.

Liberal acceptance has also given us such treasures as “done,” which as late as the mid 20th century was scoffed at when deployed as a synonym for “finished.” It was said only to be correctly applied to food thoroughly cooked. Likewise, my 5th grade teacher raged at kids referring to other kids as “kids.”

“A kid is a baby goat,” she often corrected. Well, she’s dead, and “kid” is living its best life.

So agitating against, say, “irregardless” is as futile as it is snooty. For a notion of how reactionary your pet language peeve is, imagine yourself wearing a red ball cap that says “Make ‘Literally’ Great Again!” If you just threw up in your mouth a little bit, you now see the issue. Today a red hat, tomorrow a white hood, eventually mass deportation of apostrophe abusers. Stifle yourself.

My beloved daughter, and many other people under 50, says — as the opposite of “on purpose” — “on accident.” What am I supposed to do? Honor killing?

Mind you, I understand the impulse to wince, or even curdle, at the fragility of language norms. I’ve often been quietly irritated by the fact that nobody knows what “disinterested” and “enormity” mean, which would be even more irksome if there weren’t so many other words en route to acceptance as meaning their own fucking opposite.

“My head literally exploded!” is just the beginning. Move aside to make room for bemused, enervate and peruse. Any minute now, their careless use to convey their opposites will literally render your whole belief system obsolete.

Oh, well. No one ever said a living language has to make sense. You might as well rage against natural selection. But nobody is walking around pissed off at giraffes. So let’s not only be tolerant of change; let’s embrace it. Enervate and energize? Bemuse and amuse? Peruse and skim? Vive le non-différence!

Ok, Vuolo, have I said all the right things? Have I accurately represented Lexicon Valley’s righteous open-mindedness? I hope so, because now that I’ve explained what I think, I must also confess to what I feel.

Namely, lingering disgust. Literally as figuratively for me was a bridge too far. Yes, actual usage dictates the decisions of lexicographers. But should that always be so? Nobody observes speed limits, either. Shall we raise them? Hordes have flocked to the livestock de-wormer ivermectin, first for Covid, now for cancer. Shall we add it to the public water? Hundreds of millions of people around the world still smoke. Shall we put the ashtrays back in airplane armrests? My God, again and again similar vast cohorts, asked to name the greatest movie ever made, choose The Shawshank Redemption. Shall we watch that pat and condescending cliche of a film? No! Those poor fans know not whereof they vote.

Those questions gnaw at me. So now I can admit it. After my day’s work for Lexicon Valley, I sneak through darkened alleys, lurking in the shadows en route to a certain cellar door. I am the Victor Laszlo of standard English, stealthily entering the secret meeting place and proffering the password (inflammable). Last week was a tribunal. I arrived just as the prosecutor began to examine a hapless defendant.

Prosecutor: “How do you plead to the charge of disfiguring the mother tongue?”

Defendant: “Woah, my erstwhile friend, as far as the English language, are you inferring I am disloyal.”

Crowd: “Vandal! Blasphemer! Terrorist!”

I joined the frenzy, screaming for the man’s head. Then, of course, I found myself clenching my wet pillow, drenched in a clammy sweat. Was it real? Was it a dream?

Irregardless, it’s fair to say I am ambivalent — or as its 2038 synonym will be, “ambiguous.” Is that so wrong? If you also harbor a progressive philosophy on words, yet emotionally cling to retrograde notions of linguistic right and wrong — as Rick Blaine said to Victor Laszlo’s beautiful wife Ilsa — here’s looking at you, kid.