~a column by Colleen O’Brien
We who live in the English language are lucky — our choices are plentiful. As of January 21, 2014, the Global Language Monitor says we have a lexicon of 1,025,109.8 words. I’m not sure what eight-tenths of a word is . . . a contraction like “don’t” or “ain’t”? Or maybe abbreviations like Mr. and Mrs.?
Another great thing about our mother tongue is how dumb it can get. Really, with more than a million words, it’s no wonder we come up with nonsensical sayings passing as wit. I’ve been keeping track for years things like “Keep a stiff upper lip.” I don’t get it. Unless it means that I’m supposed to smile; this is the only time my upper lip is stiff unless I’m under the influence of Novocain. When I’m about to cry, it’s my lower lip that goes wobbly, so it seems to me that if the phrase means what we think it means (be brave), the rule would be to keep a stiff lower lip.
I truly love the truly backward expression “It turned up missing.” How exactly does this happen? Let me know if you’ve figured it out.
I just read in a novel the word “preplan.” This is an old novel, from the 1940s, so it’s not a new mistake in an age in which no one edits (usually now computers edit; then, people edited). I thought the word “plan” had the assumption of “-pre” in it.
And then there’s the oven telling me it’s “preheating.” Why isn’t it just “heating”? To me, “preheating” is happening all the time, before I turn the oven on.
I never talked back when Mom said, “Put on your shoes and socks,” but I thought quite a bit about it because I had to put my socks on first.
And the “one-night stand”? As the smart alec on Comedy Central said, “So who’s standing?”
Since I mentioned it, why do we say smart “alec”? Why not smart “sam” or smart “sally”?
My grandson at around eight was like most kids that age — literal in his understanding of words. When we came through Yellowstone and stopped to watch fly fishermen in the Shoshone River, Taylor became uncharacteristically quiet; we could see him puzzling something out. Finally, he said, “Grampa, why are those guys fishing for flies?”
He also took about 20 miles to give up on the road sign about the venerable long-running ballroom near Woodward, IA. The sign read “Lake Robbins closed.” “Grampa, how do ya close a lake?”
And sometimes, when I’m “pacing back and forth,” excessively worried about something, I lighten up a bit when I think that if I were being true to the saying, I should be walking backward and then walking forward. If I go “to and fro” I think I should go “forth and back.”
These phrases could be called clichés, I suppose, but they’re not considered bad form at all, another weirdity of our rich and often oddly used language.
If you have any good ones like this — if a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Or, if you’re “nowhere,” are you “now here”? — let me know.
colleen.obrien.33950@gmail.com
