Teethpaste and Other Essentials of Language
I have more than one tooth. I brush them all at once, so why don't stores sell teethpaste? Of course, we don't have to call it toothpaste if that doesn't make sense to us. We can call that stuff in the tube a "dentifrice," like the scientific community does. Dentifrice? Really?
It's no surprise that language does not, and probably cannot, make sense to all people all the time. We all have to use it, but we come from different places, mind-sets, and education levels. Purists raise their noses when others use "may" and "might" interchangeably, but is meaning really lost if I say, "I may go to the store or I might stay home"?
I see a clear difference between the words "farther" and "further," but the dictionary doesn't. And I have a friend who refers to her "hairs" behaving or not behaving from day to day. She's right; there are a whole bunch of them, and some behave better than others, at least on my head. So who decided "hair" is a collective noun?
When things that make sense to linguists don't resonate with everyone else, rules are ignored. My students used to argue the pronoun/number rule in sentences like, "No one brought his umbrella." I had to agree that the sense of the sentence indicates a lot of people did this thing, though the pronoun and the single umbrella indicate only one and therefore require a singular pronoun. That results in confusion about whether the "one" in the sentence brought "his" umbrella or "her" umbrella. To keep the peace, I usually suggested rewording the sentence to eliminate the problem: "No one brought an umbrella." Of course, to a purist, that's cheating.
It does no good to grouse about it. Language is imperfect and probably always will be. But it seems to me that the farther one wants to go as a writer, the more important it is to further her understanding of words and how they work together. This is true whether she uses toothpaste, teethpaste, or some other choice of dentifrice.
It's no surprise that language does not, and probably cannot, make sense to all people all the time. We all have to use it, but we come from different places, mind-sets, and education levels. Purists raise their noses when others use "may" and "might" interchangeably, but is meaning really lost if I say, "I may go to the store or I might stay home"?
I see a clear difference between the words "farther" and "further," but the dictionary doesn't. And I have a friend who refers to her "hairs" behaving or not behaving from day to day. She's right; there are a whole bunch of them, and some behave better than others, at least on my head. So who decided "hair" is a collective noun?
When things that make sense to linguists don't resonate with everyone else, rules are ignored. My students used to argue the pronoun/number rule in sentences like, "No one brought his umbrella." I had to agree that the sense of the sentence indicates a lot of people did this thing, though the pronoun and the single umbrella indicate only one and therefore require a singular pronoun. That results in confusion about whether the "one" in the sentence brought "his" umbrella or "her" umbrella. To keep the peace, I usually suggested rewording the sentence to eliminate the problem: "No one brought an umbrella." Of course, to a purist, that's cheating.
It does no good to grouse about it. Language is imperfect and probably always will be. But it seems to me that the farther one wants to go as a writer, the more important it is to further her understanding of words and how they work together. This is true whether she uses toothpaste, teethpaste, or some other choice of dentifrice.
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