The Last Straw: I'm sure we all shared the distress of Donegal reader Eddie Haughey (Letters to the Editor, March 10th) when he wrote to complain about misuse of English in print, writes Frank McNally.
His particular target was "the annoying tendency to use nouns as verbs," and his examples - "premiering" and "debuting" - will have had many heads nodding. When he concluded that, faced with such language abuse, "I tend to bin the offending journal", those of us who work for journals will have felt suitably chastened.
But chastened and all, some of us will also have been sneakily re-reading the letter to see if Mister Clever Clogs himself had made any mistakes. I know I was. And suspicions were quickly aroused by his use of the verb "to bin". Imagine the excitement when my battered old Oxford English (1971 edition) declared "bin" a noun, and nothing but a noun! Then imagine the disappointment when I consulted my emergency back-up dictionary, Chambers Paperback (1994), and found that the verb "to bin" had sneaked in the back door of the English language and was now passing itself off as decent.
My main point here is not to childishly gloat over a correspondent committing the very crime of which he accuses others (that's only about 45 per cent of my point). Nor is it to annoy those people who get really upset about split infinitives, and have already stopped reading this in order to write a letter to the editor about the one in the last sentence. No. My main point is that making pronouncements about proper English is like participating in a catch-the-greased-pig competition: the target is messy, always moving, and very hard to hold.
Excuse me if I come over all Darwinian here, but language evolves rather like life itself: it advances through mistakes. Some mutations are successful, others quickly disappear. A camel breaks all the design rules known to man, but as a life form, somehow, it works. So it is with certain words and phrases. If sufficient numbers of people make the same mistake often enough, it eventually becomes proper use. A future example of this, I predict, will be the word "fulsome".
The correct meaning of "fulsome" is known to a select group of individuals, including the readers of this column, but none of us ever has any occasion to use it. By contrast, large numbers of people have taken to deploying the word as a deluxe, upmarket version of "full". I heard even a distinguished Irish Times foreign correspondent use it on radio during the week in this sense.
And you can understand why. It sounds right. It's a very seductive word, maybe because it so closely resembles other adjectives of attractiveness, such as "handsome" and "winsome". If you hear a woman described as "fulsome", you're automatically thinking curves. Hmm, come to think of it, "bosom" is similar too (snap out of it, man!). But whatever the reasons for its popularity, the new meaning of fulsome will probably be worming its way into dictionaries before long.
Another example is "decimate", which has become a posh alternative to "devastate" in certain quarters. Now God knows, alternatives are badly needed. So used are we to hearing that, say, Jordan has been "devastated" by the break-up of her relationship with whoever it is this week, the word has lost its power to describe things worthy of it: for example, the effect of earthquakes on mud villages.
"Decimate" sounds fresh by comparison, and the fact that it means "to reduce by 10 per cent" - from the Roman method of managing mutinous soldiers by executing every tenth one, thereby improving the productivity of the other nine - is a minor inconvenience. The fact is, ideas of military discipline have moved on, and there's not much call these days for the original meaning. So maybe, like an abandoned house being renovated by new owners, it's legitimate to bring the word back to life in a different form.
My general feeling is that it's good to know the rules, especially if you're planning to break them, but that people who worry about what's happening to language should relax. This is also my advice to a former correspondent to this column, Michael Collins, who also featured in the letters page this week, lamenting that the media had yet again fallen for the Dublin St Patrick's Day parade organisers' estimate of a 500,000 attendance.
Long-time readers will recall his detailed calculations about the parade route, which proved that no matter how fulsome the footpaths were, they could not have held anything like half a million people. But this annual estimate has passed into Patrician folklore, like the banishment of the snakes, and there'll be no shifting it now. Just accept it, Michael. You winsome, you losome.