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I need to stick a note on my bathroom mirror that says “Our language changes. Get over it.” Most of the time, I’m cool with the changes I see and hear, because I know that’s how language works. But some usages still make me nuts.
The first time I heard a computer instructor say “Hover your mouse over” something, I wanted to jump up and yell, “You can’t say ‘hover your mouse over’ something; hover is intransitive and never takes an obj ect. Sheesh.”
The standard use of hover: “The hummingbird hovered over the blossom” or “The chopper hovered over the accident.” Since hover doesn’t take an ob ject, we wouldn’t say “The hummingbird hovered its beak [that’s the o bject] over the blossom” or “The chopper hovered its something-or-other over the accident.” Even Microsoft Word’s lame grammar-checking feature objec ts to that; it says “Verb Confusion (consider revising).” Still, “hover your mouse over” is becoming a common express ion in computer instruction. And I have to admit that “hover your mouse over the icon” communicates the instruction more efficiently than does “point your mouse at the icon and let it rest there for a few seconds but don’t click.”
A reader wrote recently to take issue with a phrase she keeps hearing in news reports: went missing. “Whatever happened to the correct word ‘disappeared’!?” she asked. Good question—one that a number of language bloggers have been asking for the last couple of years. The went/gone missing expr ession has actually been around a good while, and is apparently quite common in the UK. Harrumph. It still sounds too colloquial for my taste.
Another usage that sets my teeth on edge is grow your business (or grow your money). We grow tomatoes, or we grow corn; but growing your business or growing your money always sounds odd. Embarrassingly, I can’t tell you why that usage sounds so unidiomatic to me. Why should I insist that you say, “Here’s how to make your business grow” instead of “Here’s how to grow your business”?
The answer is, I shouldn’t.
What’s going on here is perfectly natural—-and perfectly annoying to many of us. Here’s the inescapable truth: Our language will change bas ed on usage, not on someone’s ideas of rules. Jan Freeman, language columnist for the Boston Globe, put it this way [emphasis at the end added by me]: “People who o bject to such language changes sometimes say, ‘Just because everyone does it, that doesn’t make it right.’ But what’s true about speeding or tax fiddling does not apply to language change; if everyone does it, that does, eventually, make it right.”
So yes, I get it: The usages we’ve grown up with are changing before our very eyes. New words appear (can you say googling or blog or texting?), and while not all of the new coinages survive the test of popular usage to become part of the language, some eventually do become acceptable as standard English.
I read of a language purist who used to rage at new coinages, castigating the culprits at every opportunity. At some point he decided instead to just sit back and admire the creativity and ingenuity of speakers and writers who come up with clever new usages.
I should try to take the same position; it would lower my blood pressure considerably. But don’t look for that to happen. I’ll still be easy to spot: I’ll be the one jumping up and down and frothing at the mouth like the Tasmanian Devil, yelling “Stop saying that!”
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