I remember well reading the introductory matter to a dictionary for the first time. I know, no one really does that. But, I decided to since most people haven't. I found a number of interesting facts, but what intrigued me the most was the make-up of the committee that decided what entries to put in and how to rank and cut the information gathered to make the book that people use so authoritatively. Intrigue was the right word at first because I had never read about that before, but as time went on, my intrigue turned disbelief at the liberties they took to conform the book to their own standards, ignoring some of the usages of some of the people surveyed.
I still recall reading about the word access. In the 1980s, people began to use the word as a verb, especially when it came to accessing their money in their accounts. However, the dictionary committee didn't care that the nature of the word had begun to change. They made the decision to reflect only its noun use, so that people could only have access to their accounts. That was unbelievable and unwarranted since so many people had begun to use access a verb. I felt betrayed by the committee.
So, today as I was reading in USA Today about the orbiter Juno that had successfully been inserted into Jupiter's orbit, I came across something like access in the last sentence of the article. The article said, "The information stream will end 19 months later, when NASA purposefully plummets Juno into Jupiter, Green said." In my head I thought, there's something wrong with the two words used in the alliteration of the verb phrase. Purposefully, for one, seemed like the wrong word. I think the author meant to say the orbiter would intentionally be driven into the planet at the end of its mission. In that case, the word to use would have been purposely. I used to work with a colleague who never was able to see the distinction of the two words, so she settled on purposefully as her word to use and hoped no one would ever notice. The verb, for two, also seemed different in its use than how I was normally used to hearing plummet used. Some verbs in English don't take objects, called intransitive. A little trip to the dictionary showed that the verb was intransitive. But the author ockalf this article used "NASA purposefully plummets Juno" using plummets as a transitive verb. Juno is the object.
Many times people get words mixed up because they don't use them enough to remember the differences. Pummel and plummet look and sound a lot alike. So, I am thinking the author merely confused the two words because of lack of use, forgetting that pummel is used transitively and plummet is not. Sometimes, journalists use a thesaurus to get words and so they don't always know how words are used. Sometimes, their brains merely confuse words. And sometimes, people are writing out of their field of expertise and try to apply words they see in a completely acceptable context to an unfamiliar context and fail in their attempt at transfer. Who knows what happened here?
But, of course, dictionaries don't always report what is acceptable, which is why I started the blog with the story of access. Maybe, the verb plummet is changing. Maybe I ride with the crowd that hasn't picked up on the change yet. Maybe it's a dialect feature of the writer, past or current, with which I am not familiar. Maybe it's the dictionary's fault for not reporting usage that the younger generation has begun to use. Maybe it's the writer's background of not having or not remembering the grammar that's taught in schools. Or maybe it's just a confused writer who didn't have enough time to revise before a deadline.
Whatever. It seems like I am hearing and reading a lot of really different communication these days from what I am used to.
[The USA Today article in general is very informative and reported what happened in a professional manner. You can find the link to the article by clicking here.]
No comments:
Post a Comment