#382 Hung up

Anyone who’s listened to this column by now knows I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to English. And the word “who’s” in this context, is spelled w-h-o-’-s, as a contraction for “who has.” The other whose, w-h-o-s-e- is the possessive form of who. As in, “The shirt, whose owner even now hung from the whipping post, stripped naked to the waist as he endured the pain of the lash, lay crumpled in the corner.” We recently received a PSA from a supposedly erudite source that not only misused and misspelled “who’s” but also managed to use it improperly in the same sentence with First Annual. “The celebrity, ‘whose’ (sic) been in a number of charity events, is participating in the first annual read-a-thon.” I am sick and tired of anything that is a first annual. It’s not an annual event until you’ve done it at least once and come back to it the following year. So the inaugural event can not be the first annual event. Not that I expect a lot in a country where the president says “nuke-ya-lar.” It’s nuke-lee-er by the way. And not that what I think matters. I’m just a “control freak” when it comes to language. So I’ve always wondered: Who is the control freak, the one who changes the status quo by doing something totally off the wall or the one who seeks to maintain the status quo? Cause it seems like the off the wall one is definitely controlling the situation by taking it down a different road. If someone was the pilot of a motorboat heading steadily up a safe passage between the shoals of destruction and suddenly yanked the rudder in one direction or another, sending the boat plummeting towards disaster, I would think that someone was controlling the outcome of the situation. The status quo guy sitting in the back without his hands on the wheel, but who nonetheless wishes for the safe passage outcome, can hardly be said to be a control freak. Nope. The control freak is always the one who’s standing in the way of the one who wants to do something wild and crazy. I digress. I was disconcerted the other day when I heard some candidates for public office speak. One of the candidates in particular seemed to have a hard time with certain words. And they appeared to be “ex” words—not words that were formerly words, but words that contained some variation of “e” and “x.” He used the mispronunciation ex-cetera. The correct pronunciation, in case you want to be a usage control freak like me, is et-cetera. There’s no “ex” in etcetera. That’s okay, like people saying hundert rather that hundred, it’s kind of an Americanism. But then the candidate launched on any extended exposition of seagull poop and in order to avoid the use of the word poop instead popped out the term extra-mint. As opposed to excrement. Extra-mint. Sounds like a gum flavor doesn’t it? Oh yeah, for fresh breath I chew extra-mint. And there’s nothing like extra-mint for controlling the build-up of plaque.
America, ya gotta love it.