The Friday Fillip

One way to describe my life is as a slow movement from strict prescriptivist to not entirely relaxed descriptivist. I’m talking about, well, talking—and even more about writing. Although I still will say to myself that it’s wrong to say “between you and I,” and “presently” doesn’t mean “now,” I have managed to contain those judgments for the most part and damn near don’t even wince anymore. I long ago let go of “hopefully,” and have come to use the third person plural as a means of obscuring gender.

A little like law, English changes and it does so balancing the opposing forces of innovation and conservatism, sometimes leaning this way, sometimes that. It’s a bit boring always to be fighting a rearguard action against error novelty and much more fun to step back and look at the struggle from a remove.

One place you can do that is on Johnson, the new blog by the Economist:

named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson . . . about the effects that the use (and sometimes abuse) of language have on politics, society and culture around the world

Here you’ll find brief essays on such matters as words you’d like banned from journalese (if only), the latest internet jargon, what BP’s CEO, Carl-Henric Svanberg, might have meant by the phrase “small people,” and a disparagement of language authoritarians (sigh). My current fave is the funny exchange between the American and the Brit about the blog’s name.

Of course another great publication, The New York Times, has always shown an interest in the stuff that journalists wield. Now they’ve got a blog, After Deadline, offering “Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style.”

These blogs above the fray—and sometimes about the fray–help me stay calm when that recorded voice tells me that “someone will be with me momentarily” or when I’m told that someone quite unobjectionable has had a “fulsome” career. I can’t yet say that it’s all good—but I can acknowledge that it’s real.