Fighting Verbal Viruses

The early childhood education students at my college are always falling ill. The toddlers they look after are lovable little bundles of germs, which spread fast through hugs, kisses, and sneezes.

Webwriters are similarly at risk of succumbing to verbal viruses—words, phrases, and acronyms that leap from our monitors into our brains. Other mass media can spread such viruses too, especially TV. I can still recall John Dean, in the televised Watergate hearings, infecting millions of viewers with "at this point in time." That virus nearly killed the simple word "now."

But written text, like a computer virus, can spread plague in total silence, slipping past our mental immune system and wreaking havoc—not only on us, but on our unsuspecting readers.

Viruses That Mutate
The reservoirs of verbal viruses are everywhere: in technical jargon, in advertising, in business, and certainly in education. Every bureaucracy teems with viruses. Many viruses mutate rapidly until they fill every niche: e-mail split into e-biz, e-tail, e-commerce, and a host of others. It even consumed its own hyphen and turned into email.

With a morbid interest in language pathology, I track the spread of viruses. My own students have recently come down with "continuosis"—the continual use of the continuous tense, needed or not. They don't write, "I have traveled in Europe, I study business, and I will graduate in April." Instead they write, "I have been traveling in Europe, I am studying business, and I will be graduating in April."

I am worrying about this, but I am feeling confident that you will be avoiding continuosis now that you are knowing about it.

My confident feelings may be due to another student-borne virus I call "egophilia." Victims compulsively start every sentence with a report on their mental state: "I feel tourism is a growing industry. I think I could succeed in it. I believe my training has prepared me for success." Severe cases result in "mariachi syndrome" (I, I, yi yi)—a near-pandemic condition in corporate Webwriting, where the victim utterly forgets the reader who's the whole purpose of writing text in the first place.

Other viruses have spread from the professions and the media. Listen to political pundits and you'll notice they never say "but" any more. They say, "having said that," or "that being said." Like the "junk DNA" that clutters our cells, verbal viruses generate redundancy. Once infected, we offer "free gifts" and "added bonuses." We like to be in "close proximity" and to reach "fair and equitable" agreements. We hope for the "maximum possible" voter turnout, and if the election's "final outcome" is unwelcome, we drink until we are "horizontally level."

Some viruses appear to induce partial deafness. Since the 1930s, aircraft have homed in on airfields by following radio beams. But now, whenever anyone approaches an objective, they "hone in" on it.

You Can't Kill Them All
Language hygiene has failed to stop some notably tough viruses. "Alright" is alwrong, but it routinely appears in print. When I saw it in a Robertson Davies novel, I knew we English teachers had lost on that front. And in 37 years of classroom combat, I have yet to persuade my students that "alot" should be two words.

Now another mutant has cropped up: "majority" is attacking "most," as in "I spent the majority of my vacation in Hawaii. I put the majority of the cost on my credit card."

Mercifully, not all viruses make the jump from speech to text. In conversation, many virus-ridden young people replace "say" with "like." But we do not (yet) read blogs that say:

President Bush is like, "I have earned political capital and I am going to spend it."

A Positive Outlook
Clear, concise, plain English can be infectious, too. If enough of us write that way, others will begin to imitate us, and to recoil in horror from diseased websites. Rather than indulge in the feverish babble of "hot links to kewl sites," they'll edit themselves ... and thereby spread plain language.

We can also spread useful new words that reflect new realities. The Australian word "fossick," which means to search for gold, seems to me an excellent word for a Web search. What's more, you can even find a good search-engine site at Fossick.com.

Greek and Latin terms have often spread as verbal viruses, often in grossly mutated forms ("kudos" as a plural is one of the nastiest), but I'd like to recommend propagating a couple of such words. My excuse is that they're shorter than the terms they would replace, and would define them better.

In Latin, "weaving" or "web" is "textus," and the weaver is a "textor." So I suggest that instead of the vague and wordy term "Web content," we use textus as the term for what we put on a computer monitor. (Once printed out, it becomes good old text.) And instead of calling ourselves "Web content developers" (as if we built housing tracts or worked in a darkroom), we could be textors.

Clearly the Romans saw writing metaphorically, as a weaving of words, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee has given us the metaphor of the Web. So we might as well live with the metaphor, and slip a few bright new threads into the pattern we're weaving.

Comments

[Andrew Denny]

Thanks for this post.

Or as McDonald's says (said?): "I'm lovin' it" (TM)

And yet, while my sentiments are with you, should we really complain? Or should that be "should we really be complaining?"

Here in the UK we have the Plain English Campaign, (www.plainenglish.co.uk) which issues ukases about public writing. Apparently, we are supposed to praise writing that's levelled down to the lowest common denominator of simple understandability.

You mention John Dean's "at this moment in time". Yes, certainly it means 'Now'. And I laughed at it then. But now I think, do we really need the little twirly bits at the top of Corinthian columns either?

Call me pretentious or call me prescient, but I'm starting to think Dark, Heretical Thoughts about the Plain English Campaign. Where, I ask, is the poetry?

Or should that be 'Where, I am asking, is the Poetry?' I might not have asked it then, and I might not ask it in twenty years, but I am asking it now. And perhaps, in thinking about it, "I'm lovin' it" (TM)

Andrew Denny
www.grannybuttons.com

[Duncan]

Fascinating

[Alison]

I thank you for this post. I, too, have to be careful of "egophilia." I find that if I am not careful, the majority of the sentences I write start with "I."

I have been writing regularly for about six months now, and I am finding it challenging.

That said, I do believe that there's nothing like reading to improve one's writing and to distinguish it from the writing of the hoi polloi.

I do enjoy your weblog. I'm thanking you from the bottom of my heart for your insightful posts.

[Crawford Kilian]

Alison, you are a very wicked person!

[Alison]

Heh. I had a lot of fun composing that comment. ;-)

[Ian Philpot]

Scared to post on your site, I am. For fear of writing incorrectly. Or is it "for fear of not writing correctly"? Probably neither or both. You see what you have done...

[George]

First, I say thank you for taking the time to write this article.

My observation of the decline of English as a written language has been a long and dreary experience. It appears to me that many of this modern day's contemporary writers have degenerated to the point of authoring work in a low common denominator of text that offers no aspiration to the richness and precision of which our beautiful tongue is capable. In fact, the dreary and mediocre tripe that flows across the pages seems hardly worth my time. Where is the depth and beauty found in the works of authors of a century or more past? I read Mark Twain's 'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' again recently and remarked to a friend that it was richer and more inspiring to read than anything I've put my eyes to in years.

As we plunge forward into greater depths of knowledge as a civilization, are we doomed to lose the depth of expression we admired in older, simpler literary times? In another hundred years, will there be anything worth reading at all?

[Kurt]

You forgot my favorite pet peeve - "issues". As used in the Oprah sense, "I have an issue with that." or "You seem to be having some issues.". It bothers me that this word has replaced the more appropriate word "problem" in those sentances and others.

If somone is having issues, perhaps they simply need a box of facial tissue, not a television psychologist.