A scribe against poor use of language, inspired, incredibly, by the death of Anna Nicole Smith

I suppose there’s no point in prefacing this by saying, “I don’t want to come off as a language Nazi or anything, but…” because I can face facts sometimes, like now. I am a language Nazi. I don’t understand why people are comfortable with sounding stupid when they talk (beyond doing so for occasional comic effect), or, worse, reading stupid when they write.

This essay was inspired by the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I’m not too sorry that she’s dead. It’s a shame for her newborn child, in a way; in reality, if we were honest, we’d realize that it’s probably a boon for the child, because Ms. Smith could not possibly have been a good mother to that little girl. (It’s a little girl, right?) I’m being cynical here, but there you are.

My husband, The Most Ethical Man in the World, was the one who broke the news to me yesterday afternoon. “Anna Nicole Smith died,” he said, looking at his computer screen.
“That can’t be,” I said. “It’s gotta be a hoax.”
Nope, no hoax: the woman’s dead.
“Well, it’s just a matter of time before we see things online using the words ‘icon’ and talking about Marilyn Monroe,” I thought. “That’s gotta be the most useless celebrity death since Jayne Mansfield,” I said, as I reached over the back of my little pink comfy chair to pet our cat, who was playing with a catnip mouse back there.
I haven’t actually seen anyone yet talking about Mansfield but Monroe’s name has definitely been invoked, stupidly; and the word “icon” is being tossed around like rice at one of Liz Taylor’s weddings. It’s ridiculous.
People, good people, please stop using the words “icon” and “iconic” to describe things that really aren’t. Just stop it. Madonna is not an icon. She is a pop star. You know who’s really an icon? Moses. He’s an icon.
I just went to the reference section of our library here in the house and looked up the word “icon” in not one but three dictionaries. Along the way in the OED, my eye fell on the word “hyperbolic.” “God, yes,” I thought, as I flipped pages, “how appropriate.”
Media types should please remind themselves of the existence of the following words:
Symbol
Touchstone
Emblem, or perhaps emblematic – as in, “emblematic of the Jazz Age,” in reference to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

The fact is, if everything that the media folk described as an icon, or as iconic, actually were such, we’d all be dead from exhaustion. We can only worship so many images at one time.
But here’s the real problem: reading and writing and listening gets boring if we all just use the same words over and over again because we can’t come up with something better. Are we too lazy to come up with interesting sentences? It appears so. I am reminded of a class I took at a hippie high school in the late 1980s. This was a campus where there were no classrooms, just sort of these vague spaces where classes were held; the year before I arrived there, the bean bag chairs had finally been replaced with proper chairs, and a classmate of mine bemoaned this every week at the school’s town meeting. Smoking was permitted as long as your parents had signed a permission slip.
That’s the kind of school this was. It was, in its way, a great place.
Anyway, I had an English teacher who was a real gem. He reminded me strongly of Hunter S. Thompson; he had a way of loping around campus and you knew he was basically doing this to fill in a dead period in his career, whatever his career really was. He had us read Hemingway and some other important 20th century writers, none of whom I can remember now – he clearly loved Hemingway best – and he gave us all nicknames that made us sound like characters out of Aeschylus. He loved the verbal riff. He must have been a jazz fan.
What he did not love, oddly, was swearing. This school did not have a speech code, and students all felt comfortable using whatever four-letter words they felt best expressed what they thought. A psychology class was legendary, I remember, because in this class, no one described anyone as being crazy; people with mental or emotional problems were officially described as being “fucked in the head.” But my English teacher did not condone this. I don’t think he found such language offensive, per se; I think he found it incredibly dull.
So his rule was, you could swear, but you had to do it creatively. You had to make up a new word to convey whatever disgusting act you were trying to communicate to your classmates. This led, yes, to a lot of laughter and general silliness in class, but I think he was basically onto something. So, wherever you are, Deac Etherington, thanks for being a hard-ass when it came to language. You had a good point, you made it well, and I ardently wish more people paid attention to your point.
English has thousands and thousands of words. Why do we need to rely on one – icon, to take my current bugaboo as an example – so heavily? It’s just so fucking dull. (Sorry, Deac.)
Another word that I’ve been noticing a lot that’s being used wrongly – I could say incorrectly, but that doesn’t convey what I mean – is “flair.” For reasons totally unknown to me, people keep writing it as “flare.” A newly built condominium in my neighborhood is being marketed as having “European flare.” Really? The apartment has bell-bottoms? That’s really something.
Look. There’s flair and there’s flare and they’re not the same thing. And when I say the words are being used wrongly, what I mean is, yes, they’re being used incorrectly – but they’re also being wronged by being used incorrectly. I mean to use “wrong” in the sense of “you treat me bad, you do me wrong.” You’re hurting the words by using them stupidly. And there really isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, any excuse for this.
If I thought this was a matter of an innocent typographical error, that’d be one thing. But it isn’t. It’s some kind of massive cultural glitch. People seem to think that it does not matter if words are spelled or used correctly. Yesterday I walked past a theatre downtown where a local arts magnet high school stages productions on a regular basis. I never go to these things, because I hate theatre, generally speaking, but I laud the effort these kids make, and on the whole I assume that the theatre geeks at the local arts high school are smart and basically on-the-ball. I used to work in a bookstore near this high school, and the kids who used to come into the store were always really fun and sharp. You talked to them and you saw tons of potential. You almost wouldn’t weep for the future, if you talked to these kids.
But: here were flyers for a number of productions that this school is putting on this spring. And the word “separate” is included in the title of one of these plays. Except it’s not “separate,” it’s spelled “separate.” Goddamn it, my computer won’t even let me type the word the way these kids did; the spell-check on my computer fixes it! Let’s try it this way: the word was spelled s-e-p-e-r-a-t-e. (Take that, spell-check.)
This is not good, my friends.
My computer wouldn't let me misspell this word; how did these kids manage it? What went wrong here?
Could we please try to pay attention? In the era of text messaging and blogs and all this, every letter, literally, counts. So use them correctly, and considerately, and mean whatever the fuck it is you’re saying.