Behold! He bloggeth the KJV!

This year Rev'd Glen Scrivener is blogging his way through phrases of the 400 year old Authorised Version of the Bible over at The King's English.

Like, "Whatever"?

From UPI website:

NEW YORK, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- Nearly half of Americans surveyed for a new poll said "whatever" was the most annoying word that could be used in a conversation.

The Marist Poll received votes for "You know" and "anyway," but they weren't even close to the 47 percent that pegged "whatever" as something that had definitely run its course.

The breakdown found "whatever" to be particularly tiresome among respondents in the Midwest, Latinos and people under 45 years old.

Phrases that bug Americans include "it is what it is" and "at the end of the day."

The poll, based on 938 responses, had a margin of error of 3.5 percent.

HT: Today Programme.

Then there are also incorrect uses of literally and less to get irked by, of course...

English (Any!)

Almost anyone who's ever read anything I've written will know that I'm badly in need of a good spell checker.

Using the Word spell checker just now, I was quite often puzzled as to which of the correction options I was actually originally aiming for!

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that it would be handy if Word had an "English (Any)" option, so that one didn't have to choose between UK & US spellings. If you've got a document with lots of quotations its sometimes a job to work out whether the original used English or American spellings. And if your American spelling is even worse than your English spelling, are you then meant to as Word to switch dictionaries each time? Being lazy I tended to allow "s"s or "z" and willingly overlook "u"s, and so on.

Interesting, disputed or wrong?

Whatever is the world coming to and I never thought I'd hear the like and how times change, and so on.

I was interested - not to say shocked and distressed - just now to hear "disinterest" used on a BBC Radio 4 trailer as if it meant "uninterest", which to my mind it clearly does not.

The choice was no doubt influenced by the sequence of "disgust" and "dis- I forget what" in the phrase and I can understand that a tired presenter might make such a slip, but to me it seems unforgivable in a pre-planned trailer. One would think that someone in the BBC would have noticed it before broadcast and that the phones would have been red-hot since.

The "dis"/ "un" interested distinction is just the kind that we need to preserve as it allows the convenient and economical distinguishing of two related ideas.

However, I was surprised to see that the Concise OED on my desk allows:

Disinterest, noun, 1. disputed, lack of interest, unconcern; 2. impartiality

The usage note says:

The use of disinterested in sense 1 to mean 'lack of interest' is sometimes objected to, but it is in this sense that it is most commonly found and the alternative uninterest is rare. The phrase lack of interest avaoids both ambiguity and accusations of incorrect usage.

Even a lack of interest need not be unambiguos, as in the phrase, "he lacked (an / any) interest in Sky Television": does he not wish to watch it or does he not own shares in it?

Clearly usage determines meaning but this is a usage up with which we should not put.