A Logophile’s Favorite Words

Troubled by passion

---

The Enthusiast is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy what you’re reading here, why not subscribe? You’ll enjoy free articles, join a community of defiant praise, and get access to recommendations, playlists, and invigorating chats.

---

I never thought of myself as a “grammar nanny,” one of those people who delight in pointing out infelicitous choices of words in the speech or writing of others. In fact, I often reacted rather angrily if someone corrected me for “splitting an infinitive” or using the word “that” as a Relative Pronoun or ending a sentence with a preposition. After devoting thirty hours of my graduate studies to Linguistics courses, I was often able to point out to such folks that they were wrong in foisting such ideas upon speakers of English. Take splitting infinitives, for example. Infinitives cannot be split in Latin, because in Latin the infinitival form is a single word. But in English, we indicate the infinitival form by joining “to” with the uninflected form of the verb (“to run,” “to jump,” “to thirst,” “to go,” for example). Consequently, it was not a shock to Star Trek fans when William Shatner began each episode of that beloved show with the phrase “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” In fact, if a “grammar nanny” corrected that phrase (“boldly to go” or “to go boldly”), the Trekkie would find either of those formulations just wrong. And the Trekkie would be right.

But I have been accused of being a “grammar nanny” fairly frequently in the past few years. And I must admit that I do sound like one of them whenever I hear someone say they are “super excited,” or see them write—in an academic paper, no less—that Shakespeare was “super insightful.” There is just something about “super” as the ultimate intensifier that bothers me. What was wrong with “very,” or “incredibly,” or the other intensifiers that we have used for years? Frequently, I catch myself lecturing the users of such infelicitous phrasing. When I see them roll their eyes, I wonder if I am just being supercilious.

Having studied Linguistics, I know that languages change. Some languages, like English, change their syntactic systems over the course of centuries. Old English, for example, was much more inflected—like Latin—than modern English. A shift in the phonetic system, the sound system, happens more often than a change at the syntactic level. Think about the differences in the way New Englanders, Southerners, and Midwesterners pronounce many of the words we share. But the place where change is most rapid, most noticeable, is in the semantic system: in the words we use to convey meanings. You only have to try to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English to realize that the meanings of many of our English words have changed—rather radically—since the 14^th century. The first month or so of my first Chaucer class was spent much the same way as my Greek class: translating a “foreign” tongue into the tongue we used in Modern America.

Yet it takes only a moment’s reflection to realize that languages must change to accommodate phenomena for which a language at an earlier period had no words. No words to describe something existed—because the thing that needed a word had not been invented or discovered yet. The most obvious place to see this is in the technological arena. I am not good with a computer, though I do all my writing on a computer now, have for decades. But even I use words effortlessly, almost thoughtlessly, that did not exist fifty years ago. One simple example. Once we have composed our thoughts on our laptops, we save them in files. “Save” and “file” were in use long before computers were invented. But we refer to very different activities when we use those words with computer-generated documents than we did when we worked in offices that had huge filing cabinets that contained folders filled with paper documents. The first files I generated on a PC were stored on “floppy disks,” a new phrase to designate a new phenomenon. I wonder if my grandchildren even know the phrase “floppy disk” in 2025. The files they create are now saved in “the cloud.” Time marches on.

I say this to establish the fact that I am not a linguistic Luddite, attempting to freeze language at a particular moment in time. I understand that such a preservation is impossible. What is the old phrase to describe such an impossible task: “spitting into the wind”? But having said that, I must admit that there is still a part of me (the nostalgic part that remembers fondly a simpler time?) that wishes some favorite words/phrases of mine could resist change. Allow me to share a few of them with you.

“May/can.” When I was a child, most people I knew differentiated between “may” and “can.” In fact, in third grade, when we had an entire unit on “phone manners,” we were taught to answer the phone: “Hello, this is Jim. May I ask who’s calling?” Our teachers taught us that “may” had to do with permission to do something; “can” meant that one was able to do something. From what I hear and read, almost no one makes such a distinction today. “Can” has displaced “may” in almost every situation. I try to keep the distinction alive. The reason? There is a meaning distinction that is lost if “can” indicates both permission and ability. When I taught middle school, I tried to help my middle school boys understand the distinction. When they asked, “Can I go to the bathroom?”, I would reply, “I don’t know, can you?” It might take several exchanges over a few minutes (during which time their need to use the bathroom became more urgent) before they realized their error and asked, “May I use the restroom?” Lesson learned! Cruelly learned, I will admit. At the time, I felt that I had saved the word “may” for them. Forty years later, I worry that I might have contributed to their bladder issues.