Some well meaning souls have recently attempted to spare writers the embarrassment of using lousy expressions. I won’t quote the sources, because what I’m going to say detracts from some of it. The effort otherwise is largely correct, and God knows the English language needs all the altruists it can find. It wouldn’t be fair to single out someone and blame them for the current neuroses of modern English teaching.
Some examples:
1. “and/or”- Theory says, correctly, that this is a legal usage. It was. It has since taken up residence in common usage. It can mean “one or both in combination”, though.
2. “Basically, essentially” - Bad usage if repeated. It means addressing a subject from a basal perspective, without detail or elaboration. Please note these words do exist for a reason. They’re qualifiers, indicating that the relevant statement isn’t being addressed in detail, implying there’s more information. In effect you’re telling the listener that they’re getting a summary.
3. “Very, really”- intensifiers do have a use. “Very good” does add meaning. “Really” means in fact, and is often used to counter a contrary statement. Not absolutely necessary, but lack of intensifiers can become bland.
4. “Per”- yeah, it’s legal, but it is used, frequently. “As per your…” isn’t better English, but it is comprehensible, and makes reference to the other party. Sometimes it’s less verbose, too, which can only be for the good: “In accordance with your (insert bloody nearly anything, at any length, here)…” is spectacularly lousy usage.
5. Legal terminology and its derivatives- use it if it makes sense and isn’t too esoteric. “Ad valorem” may be a tired old expression, but go to a valuers’ convention or a reading of a will or a liquidator’s meeting and any variations on the terminology will be welcome. Sometimes it adds a bit of class to a tacky subject, too. It is poor usage if intended to be pretentious or talking down to the lucky receiver.
6. Anachronisms- don’t use, except in a worthwhile context. Etymologists are used to deprivation, but readers trying to understand Olde English, which is almost a totally different language from the present more Saxon-based version, don’t need meaningless text or references.
7. Foreign languages- only useful if it makes sense. Don’t assume everyone is fluent in Urdu or obscure Yorkshire slang. Forgivable if you are trying to use an idiom based on an expression, in which case you should explain it. In Chinese, some idioms don’t translate well, unless a native Chinese speaker who speaks English is allowed to make the idiom workable.
8. Latin or Greek- can save a lot of time for readers familiar with it, but not others. It can be elegant, refreshing, even, for classical students and those exploring literature, and utterly useless to others. Again, explain. The whole purpose of the usage can be defeated if you don’t.
9. Literary metaphors- Ditto. A habit writers should try to break. It’s nice to have literary metaphors, and some are good conversational usage, saving time so that the listeners have the opportunity to catch all those diseases they’ve always wanted. A text based entirely on them would be a novelty, though, not a form of literature. There’s such a thing as literary incest, as well as literary ethics. God spare us from writers trying that hard to be literate. Another possibility is a multiple form of crossword, everyone referring to each other’s characters and story lines. Cute, but ultimately irritating. There’s also a risk, in this current frolic among wishfully written sexual practices on every second page, of creating a dialect based on indirect innuendo. Perhaps more to the point, the readers, poor souls, aren’t obliged to tolerate coy references to old sexy books, and certainly not to old sexless books. Give the poor bastards a chance! They may want to have children some day! “In a minute, dear, I’m just trying to decipher this allusion…” “But we’re 97 now…” If you want innuendo, just put Dedicated to Rabelais on the front page. “Might hap we might…” (Gargantua)
10. Innovation in usage- Please do. To quote myself, “If you can’t be brief, be interesting”. I frequently gnaw rocks when blessed with yet another encounter with monotonous usage, and in the interests of my dentist’s peace of mind, as well as some terrified ore bodies I’ve recently found... “Coining phrases” is supposed to be some sort of crime. Given the choice between some senile, staggering hack-ism and a new phrase, I’ll be more interested in the new phrase, until I realize how lousy it is. Coined phrases are actually reflexive usage. Some are old enough for pensions, but they are a given value in a statement, just to make the coining analogy that much less bearable.
Now- a bit of extra thought. Literary English does contain more content than the normal conversational language. The risk, as the idea of better usage suggests, is that you will kill the reader with a diet of meaningful swill, horribly expressed. Alternatively, if feeling generous, you might ossify the dear little thing with astonishingly trite usage, and sell it to some collector. You hedonist, you.
I use a word like “quite” specifically as a form of timer and as sarcasm. “You’re quite intelligent, for an idiot.” A word like “Literally” never relates to anything trivial. “Literally” usually relates to something exceptional. It’s effectively “verbatim”, to qualify something as expressed. These are idiosyncrasies of mine, not rules.
How these words are used to create meaning is more important than principles. The word “totally” in American usage is well beyond saturation. That is lousy usage, because it devalues the word.
Adverbs, overall, are a case. They really mean in “in what manner”. Gruesomely, grotesquely, overzealously… they flow better, and spare the by now understandably worried reader the grind of more adjectives. “Totally”, which isn’t specific to start with, has become a conversational cornflake.
One of the definitions of bad usage is when nobody cares what it means.
Anyway,
what is good usage?
1. To express information clearly and accurately? No, that’s good communication. It might help a writer, but some readers would be justified in saying that it reduces some skeletal story lines to their true level.
2. To entertain and inform? No, although accidents have been known. Some bumbling fool of an author might unintentionally prevent mass suicides among his readership by such unethical circus tricks, but you couldn’t call it good usage, for that reason.
3. To construct text properly? Hm. Plausible, isn’t it? Sounds a bit optimistic.
4. The correct use of language? Oh, gargle, gargle. More mouthwash from the crypt. If that was the case we’d have smug Literati roaming the streets executing people for sentence construction. Another risk of pedantic usage; you can create careers for parrots.
In my opinion the only real purpose of good usage is to express yourself as well as you can, and make your point, while avoiding the bottomless abyss of bad usage, which achieves the opposite.
Is Shakespeare good usage? Not necessarily. He made up a lot of words, and his usage was a bit anachronistic for his time, compared to Bacon and Marlowe, which would have got him into a lot of trouble with Fowler.
There’s the rub: it may not be “proper” usage, but it’s good use of a language. Languages, I do have to say it, are living things. The tendency is to be more personally engaged with a live tiger than a stuffed toy.
Assuming there is some use for living things, which for some reason tend to be individuals, not job lots, variable character of expression must include different forms of usage, even in the same language, in the same conversational context.
(The preceding sentence was constructed specifically to annoy as many people as possible, and was made viable (ha!) by a grant from some critter I done met way back in ’06 when I was a-prospecting…)
Egad! No, that wasn’t some soppy attempt to justify usage-by-degrees-of-difficulty. Usage is subject to users, and contexts. Multiple contexts are easily created by multiple users, frequently instantaneously.
Consider the average conversation or dialogue: several people, of varying degrees of articulation, with varying amounts of information and ability to process that information. Do you expect to get a pristine example of language usage? If so, why? At this point all they could do with good usage is try to fit it in to the conversation and its ongoing frames of reference. Usage and content have their values. Just remember that usage without content is worthless. Without expression, it’s obscene. Propriety can get on anyone’s nerves, particularly when useless.
People do need to be aware of the principles of usage, whether anyone agrees with them or not. They are benchmarks, and at least give you a firm, well established, set of rules with which to disagree. Practical concerns of writing a story and principles of usage aren’t necessarily too compatible. The principles of expression aren’t always so clear-cut. Does your hard-case character whip out his Fowler before opening fire, or doesn’t he? Does the heroine riposte with a scythe-like witticism before incinerating her tormentor? Maybe she does, but is that with regard to usage, or expression? Which is more relevant to the actual situation?
When I said languages are living things, it wasn’t a jingle for the quaint and academically cloistered. Languages evolve. As they change, usage must evolve. The usage that survives is the usage that grips strongly.
“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer…”
Usage?
When did usage come up with a line like that? Kindly note how many literary devices in that sentence have nothing to do with usage.
“This moment is the seasonal metaphor of our emotional qualifier transformed into a further qualified seasonal metaphor” is a little ponderous…
Just be aware, writers, that whatever it is, you have to read it, and live with it afterwards.
That’s usage.