Words are beautiful things, writes University of Otago English student Emile Donovan.
Words are given a pretty hard time of it, really.
Words, apparently, are cheap. A picture is worth a thousand of them. With alarming regularity they are bastardised by every walk of society: labourers, rugby players, presidents, advertisers, teachers, even (gasp) journalists. Despite the fact that they are the lone concrete form of communication that we have - a facet of every culture, in some way or form - words, these days, seem to be marginalised. They seem to be feared.
We are encouraged constantly to use as few of them as possible, to keep our language simple and uncomplicated. Novels as a form of entertainment are perilously close to popular irrelevance, as is print journalism; the second most popular social media tool on Earth, Twitter, only allows users 140 characters in which to say something interesting (more characters, presumably, would bore the audience); and Justin Marshall's selection of adjectives while commentating Highlanders' games makes me cry on a regular basis.
I am regularly vilified by friends for using ostentatious words (like, er, ostentatious). But it's one of the great pleasures of living in an English-speaking country that we get to exploit the wonderful logistics (or the lack thereof) of our silly language.
In English there is a word for every emotion, every state of being, if you look for it hard enough. Many of them are really quite lovely. An African dictator might be power-hungry, sure. But if you live a little, he might instead be sceptriferous ... and you don't need me to tell you which of those is more fun to say.
Would you describe Lance Armstrong's demeanour at his confession as cowardly, or pusillanimous? You and your wife might be in agreement (ha!), but you could also have reached an acquiescence, and take it from me, finding a context in which to use that word without irony is a triumph in itself.
Words are beautiful things. They deserve our respect, because they are the only tools we have in explaining how we feel, and sometimes it's very important to know how we feel. Speaking or writing well brands somebody with an immediate aura of education, a commandment of respect. A person's words are simply another form of self-presentation: the vocabulary of one who is proud and confident, therefore, should surely be used with pride and confidence.
And it's not just our vocabularies that we should be looking at improving: while we're at it, is it really too much to ask for everybody to try, at least to try, to speak technically proper English?There aren't many things we definitely do every single day, every day, without exception.
Walking, I suppose, is one, but you don't see many people dragging their feet along the ground or doing a pirouette every eighth step because they couldn't be bothered walking properly. Thus, come on. Accept it. It's ''you'', not ''youse''.
It's ''fewer'' if you can count it and ''less'' if you can't. If it belongs to someone, for the love of God, it's ''your'', not ''you're'', and double negatives. Those damn ... double ... negatives ... It's not hard. These rules are not voted upon annually, they're not changing, they're not going anywhere.
All we have to do is memorise them, and use them. Why wouldn't we? What possible good reason is there not to? There's nothing to be gained from facetiously using bad English. All this achieves is causing the pedants and nit-pickers of society to make premature, probably miscast judgements.
I'm no grammar Nazi - you won't find me trawling the internet berating anonymous noms de plume for their lacklustre use of subjunctive clauses. But I take pride in my words, and I think everybody should do the same. Words, you see, have great power. They can be empty or warm, they can cut us, reassure us, frustrate us.
To paraphrase Alice, we can make words mean so many different things. And the only way we can guarantee that we're saying what we mean, and that we're meaning what we say, is to learn, to remember, and to respect them.
