Trippingly on the Tongue

Last week I made a huge, albeit embarrassing discovery of my own ignorance. I learned that the expression is 'for all intents and purposes', not 'for all intensive purposes', which I had been saying all this time. Yes, I should have known this, and yes, Bryce was right in laughing at me for it. I saw the proper phrase used on my dad's band website. I googled the expression and then came across a webpage with a thread of people listing their pet peeve misnomers, like 'irregardless' and garbled expressions like this one. Sure they're right in being annoyed by these things. It bugs me when people unknowingly butcher the language. But one person went so far as to say 'didn't those people ever pay attention in English class?' And that didn't sit well with me. In my defense, you're never really taught that sort of thing in school, so how can you ever know it other than what people around you say? You pick these things up from the people around you. I think people can take propriety in language too far to be so up in arms about a slip so small. It's like they fear that English will not hold strong unless they are ever watchful and chastise those who try to change it or play around with it, or those who don't even know any better. I think the latter is the majority, but it's still a kind of linguistic dogmatism which I find pretentious, quite frankly. To them I say: RELAX! Kindly correct someone if they make a mistake so that there'll be one less person in the world irritating you. Assuming, of course, they stop when you ask them. But that's another matter.

I've been pondering the nature of language a lot lately. This is in part because it's emphasized in our study of Shakespeare, so it's hard to avoid. But I've always found it fascinating, to begin with. It's strange to think that the English of the Elizabethans was more musical and more onomatopoeic than ours is now, and how we have a more limited pitch and tone in our speech. It just goes to show how language is more utilitarian now than it once was. We use language as a shorthand to get what we need, seldom using it for its own sake. Not only that, but our vocabulary has shrunk significantly since then, too, which is kind of ironic, considering we of the 21st century are supposed to be more sophisticated than our forebears from 400 years ago. We gather a certain amount of words to our repertoire and then just recycle them in different combinations--different, and perhaps large, but not infinite. And that's how phrases become tired and stale, as the pool gets smaller and smaller. What I like about Shakespeare is that it does seem to whet the appetite for words--and not only what they mean, but how they sound. There's a vast ocean of words out there and an infinite amount of ways to play with this trail-mix of a language, and Shakespeare--indeed all the best writers have recognized this. That being said, there are still many people who delight in the power and beauty of language. Otherwise, we wouldn't have so many poets, lyricists, and writers running around. When I went to the Faculty Reading of the Department of Writing I sensed that the individuals onstage reading their original works--especially the poems--spoke the words out loud just to hear how they sounded. They had that verbal relish that John Barton speaks of when referring to the Elizabethans. Not only did the readers last Thursday utter the words, but they took a bite out of them. You could tell they were tasting the language in their mouths as they were saying them. It's a comforting thought that language still has that power. As long as people can be moved, there will be words to move them.