For more than 50 years the English language has been my toolkit. I’ve used it to earn a living writing for newspapers and magazines. I’ve used it to write a few books and describe a wide range of wines.
It’s an amazingly versatile toolkit consisting of a mere 26 letters and a sprinkling of punctuation, but it can do more jobs than even the biggest Swiss Army pocket knife. Like any workman, I hate to see good tools being misused.
A cabinet-maker squirms in horror when he sees a sharp chisel being used as a screwdriver or a spoke shave being used to scrape mud off someone’s boots.
I often squirm in discomfort when I see precious words being used incorrectly.
I recently read a newspaper headline that said: “Violent crime a concern”. A concern? Violent crime is a tragedy. It’s an embarrassment, a shock, a disgrace. Calling it a “concern” is like describing World War II as “a spot of bother with that Hitler chap”. Not long ago, I bought a birthday card in a local shop and when I handed over a R50 note the young lady at the till said, “Awesome!”. It was not awesome at all. It was just a crumpled banknote.
Awesome is a word to describe a violent thunderstorm or a volcano erupting. Calling a banknote awesome is like using a front-end loader to put a teaspoon of sugar in your tea - total overkill. A simple “thank you” would have been adequate.
I wonder what word that young woman would use to describe Victoria Falls. If a banknote is awesome, the falls would probably be right off her scale of words. She’d probably say, “like wow”.
That’s another word that’s been cheapened. “Like” has been so overused it’s worth about the same as a South African five cent coin.
I suppose if you drilled a hole in a five cent coin you could use it as a washer, but that would be totally pointless as washers that size cost less than five cents anyway and come with the hole already drilled.
We’ve forgotten that “like” is actually a word with several real meanings. You can like chocolate, for example, or you can say rabbit meat tastes like chicken.
I sometimes wonder whether a great many of the world’s problems could be the result of sloppy communication.
We shovel a load of drivel into the conversation and then we’re surprised when we’re misunderstood. “Like, whoa, man, like I wasn’t like being rude, I was just like trying to like tell you it might be like time to like take a break for like a cup of tea and like a bun. Wouldn’t that be like awesome?” I no like.
An office worker handed out cookies to his colleagues and when the boss asked him what the occasion was, he explained his wife had just given birth to a son.
“Congratulations,” said the boss.”What are you going to call him?” “We’re calling him John.”
“John! Oh come on, you can’t call him John. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is called John.”
* "Tavern of the Seas" is a daily column written in the Cape Argus by David Biggs. Biggs can be contacted at dbiggs@glolink.co.za
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.