{"id":987,"date":"2012-10-09T10:34:11","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T14:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ohe.5c7.myftpupload.com\/?p=987"},"modified":"2012-10-09T21:31:49","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T01:31:49","slug":"good-usage-bad-usage-and-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/?p=987","title":{"rendered":"Good usage, bad usage, and usage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In another life, I was an English literature major, which means I can drive family and friends nuts with my attention to language. Waiting for a client the other day, I was browsing through a waiting room copy of Life\u2019s Little Instruction Book <\/em>[1991] and was struck by instruction #459: \u201cDon\u2019t use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved.\u201d It took me back to \u00a0Abracadabra<\/a>‘s theme\u00a0\u00a0and to a much more distant memory: a paragraph written by Morris Bishop in one of the early editions of the American Heritage Dictionary <\/em>[mine is a now-threadbare 1971 edition].<\/em><\/p>\n

While Bishop used it to launch a discussion of who determines good usage or bad, I\u2019ve always used it to remind me that language is, as he suggests, a living entity. Since language is also a primary means by which we connect\u2014or fail to connect\u2014with one another, I\u2019ve come to treat it with the utmost respect. My respect began the day I read this paragraph.<\/p>\n

Here it is. I hope you enjoy it as much as I.<\/p>\n

The words of a living language are like creatures: they are alive. Each word has a physical character, a look and a personality, an ancestry, an expectation of life and death, a hope of posterity. Some words strike us as beautiful, some ugly, some evil. The word glory<\/span> seems to shine; the common word for excrement seems to smell. There are holy words, like the proper name of God, pronounced only once a year in the innermost court of Jerusalem\u2019s Temple. There are magic words, spells to open gates and safes, summon spirits, put an end to the world. What are magic spells but magic spellings? Words sing to us, frighten us, impel us to self-immolation and murder. They belong to us; they couple at our order, to make what have well been called the aureate words of poets and the inkhorn words of pedants. We can keep our words alive, or at our caprice we can kill them\u2014though some escape and prosper in our despite.<\/em><\/p>\n

If this speaks to you half as powerfully as it spoke to me, then I invite you to pay attention to the words you use \u2026 and, harking back to Abracadabra, to what you create when you use them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In another life, I was an English literature major, which means I can drive family and friends nuts with my attention to language. Waiting for a client the other day, I was browsing through a waiting room copy of Life\u2019s Little Instruction Book [1991] and was struck by instruction #459: \u201cDon\u2019t use time or words…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-great-reads","category-self-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":990,"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions\/990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inourrightmind.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}