Honing in on the haphazard homonym

by David Benjamin

“When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say it.”
—Mark Twain, Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses

MADISON, Wis.—It is, I think, not fair to fastidiously fault a news reporter, especially a sportswriter, for grammar glitches and misbegotten word choices. The working journalist is, after all, under constant pressure to hurry up and meet the deadline. The same dispensation doesn’t apply, however, to his or her copy editor. So, when a Pulitzer Prize winner like Peter Baker of the New York Times uses the word “torturous” (subjected to prolonged and agonizing pain) when he means “tortuous” (full of twists and turns), I forgive him. But I revile the nameless desk-jockey who has—sloppily—left uncorrected this subtle but humbling blunder beneath Baker’s byline.

I’ve known my share of copy editors. I’ve often, reluctantly, served in that grueling capacity myself, although I’ve never claimed mastery of the discipline. Good copy editors are nitpicking fussbudgets with a copy of Warriner’s Grammar where their hearts should be. They fret neurotically about apostrophe placement. They will argue fiercely—when given the rare opportunity—about the Oxford comma and the Cold War between the period and the semicolon. Their Super Bowl is the National Spelling Bee.

One issue that brings my copy-editing self to teeth-grinding and hair-tearing is an aural disability among millennial reporters—most of whom have not been broadened and enlightened by a rigorous liberal arts curriculum—to distinguish differences between homonyms. I’ve found myself cringing at the printed page or shouting at the television at an alleged journalist who means to say “home in,” but says, instead “hone in”. To be clear, to “home in” is to focus or concentrate—either of which verb is preferable anyway. To “hone”—a word that becomes increasingly clunky when appended with the incorrect trailing preposition, “in,” thus requiring another superfluous preposition, “on”—means “to sharpen.”
Faced with this choice of like-sounding verbs, it’s helpful to remember the sixth verse of the classic folk tune, “There’s a Hole in the Bucket,” in which Liza instructs her consort on what to do with a dull ax: “Well, sharpen it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry/ Sharpen it, dear Henry, dear Henry—Hone it!”

Among reporters both cub and veteran, omonym confusion has become endemic. I’ve noted the substitution of “glut” (an overabundance) with “gluttony” (the second Cardinal Sin). I’ve seen “allude” used to mean “elude,” “slither” instead of “sliver,” “decimate” (reduce by ten percent) instead of “devastate” (reduce by a hell of a lot more than ten percent), “reticent” (laconic) instead of “reluctant” (hesitant), “jive” for “jibe,” “flaunt” over and over again for “flout,” and—alarmingly—“lynchpin” in place of “linchpin,” and, perhaps worst of all, “fulsome” (“disgusting or offensive, esp. because excessive or insincere”—Webster), instead of plain old “full.”

Each of these blunders violates the twelfth and thirteenth of Mark Twain’s “nineteen rules governing literary art,” which require that a writer

“ … 12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

“13. Use the right word, not its second cousin” …

Enforcement of these rules falls to copy editors, the last line of defense for good grammar (Rule #17). Proofreaders who overlook this sort of homonymical travesty are traitors to the cause. They’re culpable also for failing to stem the tide of what I call pernicious modernization. Lately, rank-and-file reporters have been permitted—probably encouraged—by the “editors” (I use this word loosely) of their “style books.” A style book is a manual of usage that determines issues of capitalization, punctuation, numeration, etc. Lately, there seems to be a trend in “style” to alter for the sake of “foolish consistency” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) the past tense form of certain “irregular” English verbs.

For example, it used to be said that an incontinent child “wet the bed.” Now, as it turns out, the poor kid “wetted” the bed. Newlyweds, by this standard, must be “newlyweddeds” (a word not found in my Mac’s spellcheck).

We have a glut of verbs, rooted in Middle English and dating back to the Norman Conquest, that do not end in “-ed”. There are scribes among us nowadays, obviously sanctioned by their copy editors and backstopped by their style manuals, who seemingly deem themselves—either willfully or ignorantly—laxatives to their language’s irregularities. I’ve been jarred to read the word “grinded” instead of “ground,” “shined” in place of “shone,” “treaded” instead of “trod,” “rived” in place of “riven”.

If this is a movement, it is both barely begun and willy-nilly. If the style arbiters of American news writing (I can’t imagine an educated British journalist typing “strived” instead of “strove”) intend to continue this crusade, they must be ready to go whole horse and Mr. Ed-ify every verb in Funk & Wagnalls. John, for example, no longer “came.” He “comed.” And Jane, who once “gave,” now “gived.” In the same vein, “fought” becomes “fighted,” “began” becomes either “begined” or “beginned,” “met” becomes “meeted,” “led” turns to “leaded,” “read” to “readed,” “fed” to “feeded,” “felt” to “feeled,” “made” to “maked,” “got” to “getted,” “sat” to “sitted,” “quit” to “quitted,” “slept” to “sleeped,” “wept” to “weeped” … Well, I could go on. My cup runned over.

I suspect the advent of clumsy coinages like “grinded” and “shined” reflect the style book’s aversion to constructions—especially “shone”—that strike the ear as vaguely poetic and high-falutin. “Strove,” although smoother off the tongue than “strived,” might read a tad too fancy for the average American with a sixth-grade level of comprehension. On the other hand, how is it the province of a sports-page proofreader to mothball a past-tense verb form, two thousand years in use, that was good enough for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Grantland Rice?

Another thing:

One of the virtues of English—and a source of its sheer linguistic pleasure—is its acquisitiveness. It collects words and structures, without prejudice, from a hundred other tongues, none more rich and lyrical than Latin. From my four years of high-school Latin, I’ve forgotten almost the entire vocabulary, except, maybe agricola (which means, I think, “toothache”). However, a number of Latin grammatical structures, relating to gender, have stuck in my head. They come back to me when I see an unregenerate Latin word, like “succubus” (m.) or “curriculum” (n.).

The commonest Latinism in English, and the most abused, is “media,” which—as anyone knows who has read Marshall McLuhan—is the plural form of the noun “medium” (n.). So, when I hear, daily, someone say, “The media is … ”, I mentally correct the benighted speaker, muttering to myself, “The media are moron!” Likewise, I hasten, with no listener within range, to point out that two—not one—“minutia” (f.) are “minutiae,” and for two “criteria” (which is Greek, by the way), you need a “criterion” and another one just like it.

I know I’m Latinizing into the wind, but I will persist in rendering the plural of “stadium” (n.) as “stadia,” “curriculum”(n.) as “curricula,” “focus” (m.) as “foci,” “gladiolus”(m.) as “gladioli” and “hippopotamus (m.) as “hippopotami.” I will draw the line, however, at referring to a pair of busses as “busi,” even though it comes from the Latin “omnibus” (for all), from omnis.

There is, after all, such a thing as a foolish consistency.