Language that makes me just a little crazy.

I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I decided to write a blog entry. Seriously – catharsis – that’s the purpose of this blogosphere, isn’t it? And, no the blogosphere is not the world around a former Illinois governor.

This is going to be about words. Dumb words. I-wasn’t-paying-attention-in-the-fifth-grade words.What is so infuriating is not the language itself. I also make some of these mistakes (ok, one of them). It’s who makes them. Not Norwegians on the North Dakota prairie. Not Cajuns in Louisiana. No, pros – professional “talkers” like sports announcers, news anchors, and…well, you’ll see what I mean.

Mr. “what.” Joe Buck puts “what” in every sentence. “He’s better than what he’s showing.” The Vikings defensive line is bigger than what the Cowboy’s line is.” I don’t have to explain that, do I? He gets paid millions to butcher the language. Great work if you can get it, isn’t it?

Sometimes dumb words are institutionalized. That is, by repetition made more or less the official language of an organization or an entire industry. When you next fly, pay attention to departure and arrival information given by your flight attendant. “We will be departing out of…” and “We will be arriving into…” Into. A preposition indicating that somebody or something moves inside something, either physically or figuratively. No definition even remotely means 'arriving.' The right word in this case is either ‘at,’ as in 'arriving at the gate,' or ‘in,’ as in 'arriving in St. Louis.' Arriving into the gate brings to mind the scene in the movie Airport in which the plane crashes into the gate, through the glass wall of the terminal.

Since we’re on ‘at,’ it is one of the most used and abused prepositions, or I should say overused. It is simply unnecessary in many of its uses. Consider this sentence, often heard: “I wondered where he was at.” Sound familiar? Of course it is. But it’s wrong. The ‘at’ is of no use, no more that other ‘space fillers’ like ‘ah,’ and ‘you know.’ “I wondered were he was.” Period.

The phrase, in a comment on a Wall Street Journal story was this: “What is any of this based off of?” Good grief. Saying that is bad enough; what kind of a dolt do you have to be to type it. Similar (but more egregious) than the ungrammatical “out of,” the departure companion to "arrivals into."

Here’s a sports version of one I hear routinely: “He was waiting on his receivers to get open.” On? You know where you ‘wait on?’ In a restaurant, and then only if you’re an employee. Otherwise, one waits for.Well, I think that’s out of my system – for tonight, anyway. In our next installment, we’ll look at grammatical redundancies. I know you’re looking forward to that.