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As one of those vile cultural elitists who cares about our language, I feel compelled to address certain annoying locutions.
We can start with epicenter
in the sense of a
really big center,
as in Detroit was the epicenter
of the American automotive industry.
In this context, the epi
prefix comes from a
Greek word that means above
or over.
Earthquakes result from motion beneath the surface of the
earth; the spot thousands of feet above the source of that
motion is not the center, but the epicenter.
If the auto plants had been underground beneath Detroit,
then that city would be the epicenter of the industry. But
that's not the case, so why not use the simple word
center
?
Perhaps for the same reason that people use
penultimate
to mean even more than ultimate
-- that is, pretension.
It would be impossible to eliminate the misuse of
ultimate
in the sense of the extreme example,
as in He was the ultimate ski bum.
However, it comes from a Latin word that means the
last in a series,
and the ultimate ski bum
certainly wasn't the last one. But if we confined
ultimate
to that sense, we wouldn't misuse
penultimate
to mean even more than
ultimate.
The pen
in penultimate
comes from the
Latin paene,
which means almost.
A peninsula
-- pen plus the Latin word for island -- is almost an
island. A penumbra -- pen plus the Latin word for shadow --
as almost a full shadow. And penultimate means
next-to-last, as in the penultimate game of the Rockies'
home stand ...
Let us return to center
for a moment, and the
awful phrase center around.
It's possible to
center on
something, or revolve around,
but
how is it possible to center around
?
We also seem to be fond of redundancy, especially when
it comes to computers. Remember talk of the DOS
operating system
when DOS stood for disk operating
system
? There's also RAM memory
when RAM stands
for random-access memory and USB bus
when USB stands
for universal serial bus.
But it isn't just computers. More and more, I see
expressions like $13.2 million dollars.
Either the
dollar sign or the word is sufficient.
To move on, when I watch the news lately, I hear people
saying We want our country back.
Have they been exiled? Was their land confiscated? No, so they're not speaking literally. And in a figurative sense, it's hard to figure out what they have in mind. I hope they don't mean the Confederacy, and they don't appear to be Native Americans asserting tribal claims for the country they lost to Manifest Destiny.
Is it the America of racial segregation? The one where women couldn't own property? The one that gave preference to immigrants from northern Europe?
Or perhaps the America where one wage-earner could support a family in a middle-class life? The one with pedestians, streetcars and passenger trains?
Merely saying you want your country back doesn't explain much; why not tell us exactly what you have in mind?
Then we get to God bless America,
a phrase that
seems to end every modern presidential speech, no matter
who holds the office.
I'm not the most devout person, but it sounds
sacrilegious to me, as if the Almighty were being commanded
to bless America.
It's my understanding that we
mortals cannot issue such commands; the power flows in the
other direction.
I understand the sentiment, since the nations of this
world generally need whatever divine blessings are
available. I just wish that it were phrased differently,
something like this: May America be worthy of God's
blessings.
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