Mal-appropriate Words

It takes great courage to write, once compulsory education is over.

Everything we write in school is marked. It doesn’t matter what colour the pen, or how kind the hand that wields it, as pupils we are all fully conscious that each word we scribe will be judged by a person of authority.

For some, this is no great trauma. Children who are quick to assimilate rules (of spelling, punctuation and grammar as well as how to play the institutional game) thrive on encouraging constructive criticism.

A larger group of kids – the sensitive; the slower learners; those with a different learning style; the high proportion of people with some kind of learning difficulty; children whose focus lies elsewhere; almost anyone, really – assimilate the idea that no matter how hard they try, their written words will be found lacking in some way.

Truth be told, without personal editors (and even then), our words are often lacking – or plainly wrong. No one can spell everything in the English language correctly. Without knowing the etymology of every single word, it’s a physical impossibility. We make mistakes all the time, and isn’t it embarrassing when we get caught out?

And yet, how irritated do we get when we read other people’s mistakes?

I asked around, and the answer is hugely.

Here are some of the frequently misused words (predominantly homophones or close homonyms) that drive different individuals crazy:

• to/too
• lose/loose
• definitely/defiantly
• rain/reign/rein
• vane/vain/vein
• genuinely/generally
• bought/bout/brought/bough
• manner/manor
• peeked/peaked/piqued
• mantel/mantle
• pallet/palette/palate
• alter/altar
• their/they’re/there
• dudgeon/dungeon
• and my personal favourite, bear/bare

Interestingly, not one of the people who sent me their pet hates mentioned the same word as anyone else.

I’ve been pondering our double standards. Writers who dare to share their words in public are frequently as vilified as they are revered, ask E.L. James.

It’s no wonder few people write. Many, many Facebook users never share anything on their walls, let alone their own words. Only a tiny proportion of blog readers are prepared to comment on what they’ve read. As for writing a note to the teacher, who still does that? We pretend to be far too busy to use whole words and punctuation in texts, Tweets and emails, and no one can judge us for that, can they?

Yet we read other people’s words voraciously and critically. We scoff at their mistakes, heap scorn upon their style and grind our teeth at the errors that we love to torment ourselves with.

But I secretly love the creative misuse of language. For one thing, the fact that someone bravely disregarded his or her inner demon whispering ‘you’re no good, and everyone who reads this will know‘, makes me proud. I’m proud of the guts humanity continuously demonstrates in the face of its own ridicule; and I’m proud to be thought worthy of access to otherwise private thoughts. I’m proud to count myself amongst the brave souls who share their words in public; and I’m proud to be one of the few allowed to read the words of some of the most marginalised writers in society, adult literacy learners.

My second reason for this unusual form of voyeurism (a secret desire to see a lot of inappropriate language is a little kinky, don’t you think?) is that errors are intriguing to me. The more bizarre the word choice, the better the puzzle. I suspect other adult literacy specialists out there may feel the same way. Curiosity over the origins of an author’s errors excites me. And when I say author, I refer to any courageous individual who puts pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – when it’s not absolutely necessary.

Just look at these beautiful examples of mal-appropriate words:

• his syrup latent lips (laden)
• we could somehow condone him into letting you meet them (cajole)
• He would just get up, sunder through the club and then return. (saunter)
• her pert pink nibbles (nipples – how cute is that?)
• thrown to the waste side (wayside, but waste side is so apt)
• from her shoulders to her crouch (crotch)
• he jester with his hands for me to come closer (gestured)
• I got into plastic surgery, to help people who are disfigured and scared (scarred – but helping scared people seems more noble)
• Then the thought accrued to me (occurred)
• There cannot be any secretes between us (there can, however, be secrets)
• donates a large portion of her time and recourses (resources)
• the silver band that adored my neck (much nicer than adorned)
• Yarning awake (yawning)
• two of them as duel ring bearers (dual! But duel is awesome in this context, can you picture it?)
• at the store, I bought some beagles, croissants, muffins and fresh fruit (you may not believe I whittled this list right down, but I think you’ll agree that I saved the best – bagels – ’til last)

Mrs Malaprop* would be proud.

You can tell a story with intelligence, grace and sensitivity and still spell a dozen words or more per chapter wrong. It doesn’t make you bad; it doesn’t even make you a bad writer. It does illustrate the need for more freely available editors, but honestly, where’s the fun in that?

* From Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy-of-manners, The Rivals.

Stop Chewing Your Verbs

I hope you will forgive me for the extended hiatus of this blog. In my absence, I have been Being very Literate – reading, writing, speaking and listening in two job roles at once, while completing a ‘practice’ novel. I’m proud of my achievements, but itching to get back to my original plans.

I have a long list of literacy topics to explore, but to get back into good habits, I thought I would write a little bit about grammar.

There have been phases during the last sixty years of England’s politically driven education policy, in which the teaching of grammar has been pretty low on the agenda. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that any child would have left mainstream schooling without having come across the term ‘verb’ at least once.

The majority of first language English speakers in community classes adamantly refute ever having been taught it.

A naïve teacher will spend whole lessons on what a verb is, in order to make up for this appalling lack. Five weeks later, with an OFSTED inspector in the classroom, she will proudly ask her students to point out the verb in a simple sentence. Inevitably, a hushed silence will descend, until a brave soul enquires, “What’s a verb again?”

Pondering over why it’s apparently impossible for adults to retain their knowledge and understanding of parts of speech (and yes – I struggle with some parts myself), I noticed the disadvantages of an inability to internalise the meaning of ‘verb’.

Many common errors in writing can be ascribed to this lack of understanding.

Take the frequently confused use of past and passed.

Past can be used as a noun: the past is another country; or a preposition: the first turning past the pub; a prepositional adverb: catch him when he runs past; or an adjective: past teachers gave up on grammar. It’s never used as a verb.

Passed, on the other hand, is always a verb. We don’t need to go into detail about transitive and intransitive verb forms to explain its use, or not in an adult lit class, anyway. It’s sufficiently difficult to get the concept of a plain old ‘doing’ word across. Telling learners that: “If you can do it, you probably mean passed; and if you want to describe where or when something is, you probably mean past,” might work.

The trouble with describing verbs as ‘doing’ words is that, sometimes, verbs are ‘being’ words instead. That is a whole new concept for the majority of learners.

The first thing I learned in high school French was how to conjugate the verb être (to be). I can barely speak a word of the language now, but I can recite the conjugation as religiously as the Lord’s Prayer: Je suis – I am; tu es – you are; il/elle est – he/she/it is…

I wonder whether, had we taught our kids to do the same thing in their first language, they would confuse its and it’s quite so often? Or theirs and there’s? I think this might be worth exploring.

I saw a very subtle verb error recently. An author used ‘revered silence‘, but she meant ‘reverential silence‘. The phrase jarred me from the story, although it took me some time to understand why.

In order to use ‘revered silence‘, the writer would have to have alluded to the person or thing ‘doing’ the revering. If she had, the term still would have been clumsy, as it was a passive tense in an otherwise active story.

Perhaps ‘reverential‘ – an adjective in this sense – was a word the author felt uncomfortable using. She almost certainly wasn’t consciously aware of the difference between a verb and an adjective in the context, and for the most part, it hadn’t prevented her from telling a good yarn.

Which brings me neatly to another common mistake – the muddling of the words ‘conscious‘ (a state of being) and ‘conscience‘ (a noun to describe the nagging feeling we get when we indulge our bad habits).

Often, literacy improvement in adulthood is more akin to learning not to chew your fingernails, or pull on a cigarette, than it is about fresh ideas. If anyone is looking for a doctoral thesis to write, they could do worse than study a methodology for teaching old dogs new grammar habits.