MAKING FEWER MISTAKES

I've been listening to more news radio than music on my drive to and from work, mainly because the music station DJs annoy me. The drawback to this, of course, is that with less music you get more speech, which just makes me realize many more mistakes than usual.

Less music.
More speech.
Many more mistakes.

Seems fine, does it not? I certainly didn't write "fewer music" or "much more mistakes", did I? Then why would people say it that way? How do people not realize their mistake as soon as they make it?

The "fewer/less" problem has been on my list of peeves for a while. I know, it's hard to believe. In the past, it would crop up every so often, and I'd shudder slightly and let it pass. But now I'm hearing it more and more, and I don't think it's a renewed sensitivity to it -- I think the problem is spreading.

If you're looking for an explanation about the usage of these words, I'll give you my quick version. Some things can be counted. Some cannot. People can be counted, while water cannot. That's right, you can have glasses of water, pools of water, molecules of water, and they're all countable, but water is not. The use of "less" versus "fewer" depends on whether the object is countable or not.

So, you can have less water, but you can't have fewer water. This, I should hope, makes complete sense. Fewer water? And to be honest, I don't think this mistake is made often. But this is becoming all too common: "Less people showed up today than yesterday." To me, this is obviously wrong, glaringly so.

So, why does this happen? My guess is that, with the decline of language and people's vocabulary, they just see "less" and "fewer" as synonyms, and "less" is more common, so it's used all the time. And that's fine.

Well, no, I don't really believe it's fine, but I can accept it, as I know I have to accept all the other errors that are becoming «correct» in today's use. But what I would like to see and hear are professionals, at least, knowing the correct way to write and speak.

And perhaps that's my real issue. More and more, especially on the radio, I'm hearing such poor English. Those same music station DJs that I'm avoiding for their generally annoying morning banter make mistakes all the time. And, I should like to think, they're professionals in the field of public broadcast. Someone has deemed them qualified to speak to an audience.

Sure, live radio should be given some leeway. After all, the majority of it is ad-libbed, so their thought processes might change halfway through saying something, and thus come out incorrect. And I can accept that. But what excuse do the advertisements have? These are pre-recorded. These are, I assume, edited. Edited by editors, who I again assume, are professionals. Is this not their job? Their ONLY job?? Should they not be held accountable, especially to the youth who are going to hear and propagate the mistakes?

Perhaps I just need to make less assumptions.

SOUNDS LIKE STUPIDITY

It has definitely been a while since I've ranted, but not for any lack of material. I find that these things hit me when I'm nowhere near a computer, so I have no way to record my thoughts, and my memory being what it is, they're soon lost. What a shame.

Here's a short one I had pointed out from a friend. It's from a post on a web board, which is a treasure-trove when you are looking for the mistakes of today's youth. At least, I hope it's our youth.

The context isn't important, I believe, so I'll just snip out the really relevant parts.


Nats is confused and melon calling and self-degrading and self-pittying....this is not "evil",

"Evil" would vomit at all the wishy washyness of Nats and Aribeth.

And Aribeth is Psycho in addition to confused and melon calling and self-degrading and self-pitying, and not "evil".


Hopefully your brain paused momentarily, if not longer, on the "melon calling".

Now, working with the context, that all the other terms are adjectives and not verbs (Nats and Aribeth aren't calling out to melons), then what could the author possibly mean? Is melon a misspelled word? Is this slang, with "melon" meaning "head", so "melon calling" is ... insulting someone's head? No no, we ruled out a verb.

Melon calling. Melon calling. It rolls off your tongue, doesn't it? Try it. I promise it'll help. Melon calling. Are you melon calling?

If you haven't gotten it yet - I read it many times before I figured it out - I won't spoil it for you. But this is an extreme example of what I've talked about before, where people are hearing words but never seeing them, and thus are «mapping» them into words that they do know. They get a sense of the meaning of the «word» they've learned, and don't give any thought to how their interpretation could possibly make any sense. Melon calling? Why? Why would you ever believe that that's right? The whole "should of"/"could of"/"would of" issue can be glossed over in print and most readers don't notice it. That doesn't make it right, but at least communication hasn't broken down. But "melon calling"?

I like to think of myself as "hep" and "able", so I can keep up with today's argot. But this? It took me way too long. And the other posters on the message board didn't bat an eye. Was it because they glossed over the unknown and just took in what they could understand? Or was I the only reader on that board that didn't automatically know what the poster meant? Am I that out of touch? Have I fallen behind?

Now I'm feeling a little melon calling myself.