thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

It’s weird how when people go to work – whether it’s happens when they get dressed in the morning or walk through the doors of their office building – they start to get a bit oldy-worldy with their word choices. It’s as if this weekend you might visit the Ideal Home Exhibition, purchase chattels and fine adornments to place upon the mantel within your abode, and then go to work on Monday and start talking normally – only it’s the other way round.

It always gets to me. I find myself twitching when someone says these things because, if they’re speaking, not writing, I can’t just draw a thick red line through their words and write notations in the margin. It irritates me because I suspect people think using archaic language makes whatever they’re talking about sound grandiose and more important.

That’s why they talk about implementing initiatives across all departments, as if they’re in a tower surveying everything from above – including minions. It’s back to that nostalgic oldy-worldy view of things.

And I’m not a violent  person – if I were, I probably wouldn’t have to blog – but sometimes, when I hear people say around when they mean about I think I ought to be sectioned.

So, after spotting the awful way that email used amongst last week, I have been obsessing about prepositions and how they’re used in business speak.

There is apparently a word for people who obsess with the mistakes that others make in language. It isn’t ‘sub’, or ‘copy editor’, or even ‘pedant’. It’s ‘peevologist’.

I have only come across this in the blogosphere and it has given me a whole new paranoia to dwell on – or should I say dwell upon, or even obsess around. Am I or am I not a peevologist?

According to Mr Verb, the expression comes from Boston columnist, Jan Freeman. Mr Verb is pretty down on peevologists, and then there’s ‘English, Jack’, who really takes great exception to peevolgists in his blog – perhaps unsurprisingly when you look at where he keeps his comma.

I read all these over the week and felt miserable. Is this what my life is about then? Worrying about apostrophes in my spare time, upsetting myself over the way my colleagues use prepositions? There must be more to life than this.

Then I came across this – a call for peevolgists to unite. This was a low point, I have to say. The things that bother some people! Monica really objects to shop signs that put a line through the middle of a ‘C’ to make  an ‘E’, or turn a ‘W’ upside down to make an ‘M’.

“Buy another set of letters and do it right!”

She screams, adding:

“It is a glaring indication of laziness and I refuse to frequent the shops of lazy people…”

Is this what I’m becoming – one of those people who won’t buy delicious looking apples from market stalls where the sign says ‘apple’s’, even at those moments when all I really fancy is a nice juicy apple?

I can’t tell. May be. I’m getting upset about prepositions, but even when they’re misused at least I think I can understand what the business-speak people mean when they sit within a room. Surprising really, when I think of how little I understand them the rest of the time, and how completely impenetrable I find their writing.

What will happen to me? What will I become? Could I become like Laura, shamelessly plugging my own blog in other blog comment boxes without any subtlety at all, and clearly no sense of irony whatsoever. She tells the united peevologists:

“My biggest complaint is with professional writers and editors who are too lazy, ignorant, or indifferent to write correctly spelled, properly punctuated, and grammatically correct sentences.”

And then goes on to plug her blog – ‘terriblywrite’.

How terrible is that?