A couple of odd usages popped up today, so it’s time again for the Grammarnator to grace the pages of the Insider.
One was a word, in a comment on NHPR that children were being used increasingly in political ads (on abortion, gun legislation, etc.) and opining that their presence seems to “unfang the opposition immediately.” Since defang has been around for a while, along with verbal cousins like debone, deflower (14th century for that one), defog, defoliate (1791, predating Agent Orange for some time) defrock, defrost, dehumanize, delouse, and dethrone, I will conclude that the speaker isn’t as familiar with his language as he might think. I wonder if he reverses the process and uses de when he should use un, so that the villain in an old drama is told to “Dehand that woman.” If so, let’s hope it’s not Titus Andronicus (hey, how often do I get to make a sick joke about Shakespeare’s goriest play?).
Another strange word appeared two days later when the Monitor reported that the larvae of the emerald ash borer “overwinter in the bark.” I know about people who winter over in Florida and about words formed by attaching adverbs to the front of verbs (“I’ll call you back if you leave a callback number.”), but I prefer to treat overwinter like overwater, so I would use it only to write something like “Nature overwintered us this year with too much cold and snow for my taste.”
The other, more serious, is an example of punctuation that I spied in Time a week or so ago. The issue was put out with the recycling, so I was going to forget about it, but there it was again in the Monitor, in an AP story about a diplomat murdered in Afghanistan. Said her dad, “It’s like a nightmare, you think will go away and it’s not.” Since the bereft did not speak with a comma, the writer put it in. I hope that many readers found this strange. And I hope that none of them thought of putting it between think and will in order to solve the problem, since that would only create a classic comma splice run-on.
The problem, however, is with the comma. It’s replacing a once-common word that seems to be rapidly vanishing, the good old relative pronoun that, which in this case would be starting an adjective clause. What kind of nightmare is it? The kind that you think will go away, but it won’t.
That is a very handy word. I’m almost as sorry to see its use decreasing as I am to see “there are” replaced everywhere with “there’s” and, last week in another AP story, “here are” replaced with “here’s” (“Here’s the 15 greatest moments in NCAA basketball.”). I suspect that (there’s that word again) the cause is the general shortcutting that digital communication encourages. Such is progress!
