I mean the people who say "troublesome" for "troubling." This is a very serious gaffe, given how immoral it usually is to dismiss something truly troubling as merely troublesome. What to the rest of us is troubling in Iraq is troublesome to the Bush administration, for instance. If they said it is troublesome, they'd mean it. But time and again I hear perfectly well-meaning people who mean "troubling" pick the wrong word. Please stop these people.
I also beg you to stop the people who say "unchartered territory" for "uncharted territory." I was actually kind of shocked to hear such a boneheaded malapropism in an oil company goodwill ad (Exxon?). How many millions is it giving to the advertising firm that turns out this bizarrely wrong copy? But you hear this one all the time.
I bring these up in part because I usually find lots of other grammar police whining about other such errors when I google them, but these two have hardly been touched. The first one, as I said, is more serious because it is actually usually unethical to make this mistake.
Please stop them.
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I agree with you wholeheartedly. My pet peeve these days is the general use of "for free."
More importantly, I think that I have discovered some "unchartered territory." Here in Thailand, in the mountain provinces, so much of the terrain cannot be reached except by helicopter that those areas cannot be deeded to anyone. It is, however, "charted." If anyone wants to clear a road to a nice spot, they are free to and can profit from it, but no ownership is possible.
Is that "unchartered?"
And yet, sometimes, errors are the source of innovation, expansion of meaning, and improvement. Instance #1: my wife Faith, who recently said "heart-rendering" instead of "-rending." (Because she grew up on a farm?) Technically incorrect, of course, but I thought it freshened up and revivified a damn stale metaphor. Instance #2: my friend Phil, who once referred to an act or person being "self-defecating." Again, not the textbook phrase, but what a wonderful expansion of the concept! You don't just "deprecate" yourself—you're so into putting yourself down you're actually shitting on yourself! And surely at least some of our (now accepted) words and their multiple meanings had their origin in similar mistakes. As in biological evolution, “errors” (mutations) can be fruitful and lead to increased fitness and diversity over time. Hurrah for living language!!!
And then there's the infamous gaffe (I presume it was a gaffe) in which a Clinton supporter introduced her as someone with superior "testicular fortitude." The mistake is indeed sometimes the mot juste. However, not always. Not even most of the time. "Heart-rendering," for instance, is surely colorful in its way. But it doesn't mean what the speaker intends to say: people speaking of heart-rending things don't intend to inspire thoughts of boiling fat (it would take an awfully sickly heart to be rendered at all, wouldn't it?), or of the accompanying stink. It would of course be possible to imagine situations in which "heart-rendering" would be precisely what it meant, in which its use would be a delightful twist of the knife in, say, an attack on some sort of bloated melodrama designed to appeal to bloated white trash. If the phrase were selected for such an apropos moment, one would have to say, "Gentleman, a genius." But otherwise it's simply a misstatement which at once emphasizes how overused the proper turn of phrase is and injects unintended, even contradictory, connotations.
By the way, there is some familial connection between "unchartered" and "heart-rendering," isn't there? I wonder if there are similar mistake we can think up.
Which brings us to what, for me anyway, is the salient issue: actually having something fresh and interesting to say. We all, alas, encounter impeccably precise pabulum every day. I suppose we must prefer it to imprecise pabulum, though at least the latter grants a venue for self-righteousness and/or amusement. And what is the former, after all, but a very finely rolled ball of shit? Dung-beetle speech and dung-beetle prose? Freshness and Accuracy in Reporting, I say! So not to disagree, exactly—and maybe this has something to do with my having taught teenagers—but give me spirit, curiosity, and a point and we can polish out the dents and dings later. Too many people mistake that chrome-like sheen (or perfect roundness) for content, and won’t write or say anything daring at all for fear of someone taking it apart. This is a loss—if not for everyone, then certainly for the persons themselves.
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