SPELLCHECK STRIKES AGAIN

I feel a little better about my plague of errata this morning. The Toronto Star, reporting on the sad story of a man who was promised home care and is still waiting.
The Star, maybe spell check is at it again, reported that the man had his "prostrate" removed. Does that mean he is now erect? Of does it also mean - you're gonna love this - that he has beaten his erectile dysfunction?

One of my most dedicated readers, who happens also to be an academic, scolded me for my misuse of the word "decimate." Strangely, she is a historian (or should that be AN historian?) never enjoyed the study of English. She was quite right, if you are a strict purist, decimate does not mean "ravage" - as I used it to describe the drop in consumer buying power - but means to reduce by one tenth. In spite of sending her a copy of the dictionary definition, she argued that I should know better. She also suggested that I write a blog about language misuse.

People who write books about grammar and solecisms and misplaced modifiers and redundancies, are not boring only to a small group of language hairsplitters. The only exceptions I can think of are Bill Safire, the ex-Nixon speech-writer who wrote for the New York Times, and the hilarious book about punctuation "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.

There was one other. The title escapes me but she wrote with wit about people who "talk fancy." It was all about absurd embellishments. Problem is: no one seems to read them except people who want confirmation of their own impeccable English. I have yet to hear anyone who says "at this point in time" retract and apologize.

In my own family there is at least one dissenter. I commented about the pronunciation of a word and his response was: "Who cares." A pragmatist, he insists that communication is more important than accuracy. He's right of course.

Except I confess that I do value language. Just as I enjoy music that is elegantly constructed, and played with musical fluency, I find that language has an innate elegance that should not be destroyed by bowdlerizing words or "evolving" to the point where we will find "I ain't got no nothing" becomes acceptable.

Grimly fighting to the last morsel of utter boredom, I carry on.

Solecists of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your illiteracy!