wordplay

Thursday, March 15, 2007

We cautioned you last week that Wordplay would have a limited run before this space returns to subjects more local than debate over English usage. Nevertheless, it has been fun to see the passion with which an astonishing number of you embrace the subject. Even more delightful is that every one of you thinks that you're absolutely correct and surrounded by illiterates.

At Times, Advice Proves Unhelpful

The new feature you call "Wordplay," where you plan to print readers' comments about words and phrases that irritate them, would better be called "Word Bludgeon."

An earlier reader expressed the danger of confusion in using 12 a.m. or p.m. vs. midnight or noon. Several readers claim that the fact that the "m" stands for meridian, and meridian means noon, removes the confusion. Since we do not write "12 m," I fail to see how this helps. It is entirely a matter of convention, and the first reader was correct in observing that many people do not recall the convention correctly.

Another reader complains about using "over" when we "should" use "more than" for numerical comparison. Google has over 6 million entries for "over a million" and just over a million entries for "more than a million." There are similar but not so strikingly lopsided numbers for hundred and thousand. Sorry, if people use it that much, it is right.

I expect "Wordplay" to be a somewhat amusing, but otherwise useless, collection of arbitrariness, personal prejudice, ignorance, hypocrisy and half-remembered "rules" from Strunk and White.

-- Jay Cummings, Greenbelt

Term Has Lost Lion's Share of Meaning

Adding to the misuses of the English language, the "lion's share" is an incredibly clever descriptor that, unfortunately, has lost its original meaning.

The term, as I understand it, means "all," and nothing is shared since the lion just doesn't share! It's an often sarcastic reference to someone keeping it all for themselves. "He took the lion's share for himself" means, simply and sarcastically, he took it all.

-- Bill Kay, Clifton

In Line for a Scolding

A relatively recent addition to the confusions in the English language is the use of "on line" vs. "in line." More and more, I hear people saying "I waited on line for the movie," when they should be saying "I waited in line." I thought "on line" meant "connected to a computer."

-- Jamie Shoemaker, Arlington

The Satanic Verse

You can add to the list:

· "Verse" instead of "versus," as in the Redskins "verse" the Cowboys.

· "On tomorrow" instead of "tomorrow." It's on Monday, on Tuesday but not on tomorrow!

-- Sylvia Willoughby, Crofton