Committee of Morons

“The Town hall, which looked as if it had been designed by a committee of morons in an excess of alcohol and civic pride, stood in isolated spendour bounded by two bombed sites where rebuilding had only just begun.”

— P. D. James, Cover Her Face, p. 158.

Shall, Will, and Drowning

In formal writing, the future tense requires shall for the first person, will for the second and third. The formula to express the speaker’s belief regarding his future action or state is I shall; I will expresses his determination or his consent. A swimmer in distress cries, “I shall drown; no one will save me!” A suicide puts it the other way, “I will drown; no one shall save me!” In relaxed speech, however, the words shall and will are seldom used precisely—our ear guides us, or fails to guide us, as the case may be, and we are quite likely to drown when we want to survive, and survive when we want to drown.

—Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 1959 ed., pp. 45–46.

Like

“The use of like for as has its defenders; they argue that any usage that achieves currency becomes valid automatically. This, they say, is the way the language is formed. It is and it isn’t. An expression sometimes merely enjoys a vogue, much as an article of apparel does. Like has always been widely misused by the illiterate; lately it has been taken up by the knowing and the well-informed, who find it catchy, or liberating, and who use it as though they were slumming. If every word or device that achieved currency were immediately authenticated, simply on the grounds of popularity, the language would be as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines. For the student, perhaps the most useful thing to know about like is that most carefully edited publications regard its use before phrases and clauses as simple error.”

—Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 1959 ed., pp. 41–42.

Pulchritude

“A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.”

I found this brief, interesting paragraph in the Mac OS X Dictionary program when I looked up “Beauty” in the Thesaurus. It was cool enough to post. I love the thought that words are “both symbols for things and very real things themselves.”