EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
Do You Like My Writes ?
ROBIN CARSON | Editor , news & views
On September 22 , the headline on the front page of the Edmonton Journal was , “ We ’ ll be seeing some solves ” [ sic ]. The headline was taken from an interview with an Edmonton Police Service spokesperson . It took me a few minutes to rub the sleep from my eyes ( the paper comes at six in the morning ) and figure out what the heck it meant . It referred , as a hunt through the article revealed , to solving unsolved murders .
There is a trend , especially in business and in government , to use words any way the writer or speaker feels like using them . I blame Steve Jobs for starting this trend with Apple ’ s ‘ Think different ’ campaign of a few years ago . Verbs become nouns ; adjectives morph into adverbs . Even the literati are guilty with their , ‘ A wonderful read by a new author .’
Who cares ? After all , most people don ’ t know the difference between an adjective and an adverb except as in dim , awful dreams of their school days when ‘ parsing ’ had little to do with political utterances and everything to do with sentence structure . Besides , language changes , doesn ’ t it ? And who are we to play Canute to the tides of change ?
I am a retired English teacher . In my classes , I used to teach that change in language is natural . If our English language had not changed , we would still be speaking like Shakespeare . Or Chaucer . Or like that same Canute who tried to show that even as king , his power was limited . We can neither legislate that language must change , nor create rules that it may not . Remember the interrobang ? How about ‘ Tey showed it to tem ’? No ? Then how
about the fact that strict language legislation does not prevent C ’ est weird en masse ! or Worry pas ! in Québec ?
However , while I understand that language can and will change , it is rate of change and type of change that I object to with a sentence like , ‘ That is too big of an ask .’ With acceleration powered by modern media , rate of language change is more rapid than it has ever been . Slow change in language permits generations of speakers to understand what other generations of speakers are saying ; rapid growth discounts the language of earlier generations . Listeners are challenged to learn the new language rather than the speaker having to communicate in the traditional one — a sort of dialect of generation rather than of region .
As for type of change , while ‘ snuck ’ sneaked into our language as the kind of change that arises from people preferring one form of a word to another , ‘ snuck ’ doesn ’ t pretend not to be a verb .
“ Do you have a solve for this problem ?” demonstrates a willful disregard for even the lowest level of correctness . What is wrong with the word ‘ solution ’? I understand that using verbs as nouns — one form of nominalization — is part of speaking a language ; however , the assumption that it is all right to do so anywhere , any time , is a kind of linguistic entitlement that parallels taking up two parking spaces with your Porsche . And it is just plain lazy .
So come on , you business types and politicians . You can do better . I have the knows that you can !
Just say NO to nominalization ! �
news & views WINTER 2017 | 9