Do you suffer from Stickler’s Fury? It’s that feeling of uncontrollable rage that overtakes you when you encounter a particularly egregious crime against the language.
I’m not talking about the slightly disgruntled pang you feel when you pass a Starbucks and that little voice in your head says, “Considering the brain trust behind that venture, you’d think they could have sprung for the apostrophe.” Starbuck, as you know, is a character from “Moby Dick” (he tries to stop Ahab’s obsessive hunt for the great white whale). As far as I’m concerned, if the coffee purveyor admired Herman Melville enough to pay him tribute by borrowing a moniker from one of his inventions, it should have gone the extra mile and accorded Starbuck his rightful apostrophe. I mean, we’re not talking about multiple Starbucks (the character); there is one Starbuck. His coffee shop should be called Starbuck’s. It’s not like Ralphs, the supermarket chain; Ralphs (plural) happens to be the name of the family whence the grocery giant sprang.
Nor is Stickler’s Fury the urge to roll your eyes every time you hear someone use the word “impact” as a verb: “Yes, Johnson, the addition of the apostrophe to our name will certainly impact our bottom line.” I guess saying “have an impact on” just takes too long. Don’t even get me started on the neologism I recently had the displeasure of overhearing: “impactful.”
Now, I understand that incorrect usage is the engine driving linguistic evolution. Whatever the common folk were saying is what turned Old English into Middle English into Modern English. Eventually, just about every horrible variant becomes accepted – perhaps not preferred (at least not at first), but accepted. I remember when I was a kid, if my mother heard someone use the word “forte” and pronounce it “for-tay,” great scorn would be heaped upon this unfortunate (though, thankfully, not to his face). “Yes, it has its basis in French,” she’d point out, “but there is no accent aigu over the e; it’s just ‘forte.’” Of course, as the years went by, so many pretentious idiots were saying “for-tay” that we looked like the nitwits if we omitted the Continental flourish. Before long, “for-tay” was appearing in dictionaries as an acceptable variation.
Still, though I am happy to be speaking Modern English and not the language of “Beowulf,” there are some things I just can’t abide.
The heat began at my feet and surged upward. My face flushed. My eyes flashed. My heart pounded.
It has recently come to my attention that a certain professional subset (who will remain nameless) has begun using the word “overwhelm” as a noun, as in, “He was suffering from overwhelm.” Not “He was overwhelmed,” or “He found the problem overwhelming,” but “He was feeling a high level [or something] of overwhelm.” The first time I saw it, on a website, I could only rationalize, “Ugh, another field-specific bit of jargon forcing its way into common parlance."
A few days later I got an assignment from a new client. I read the first paragraph of the text he’d hired me to edit. There it was: “He was drowning in a sea of overwhelm.” The heat began at my feet and surged upward. My face flushed. My eyes flashed. My heart pounded. This, my friends, was Stickler’s Fury. I trembled at the keyboard, unsure how to proceed. My mind raced. Could I let this go, just edit the offending language, or would I have to say something? It occurred to me that if I did not stop this person now, he would go on to spread the poison. Soon enough, people would be saying with impunity, “Oh, sorry, I can’t go out tonight – I’ve been feeling a lot of overwhelm lately.” I had to take a stand, draw a line in the sand. I knew I risked overstepping my bounds and losing this client, but I had to speak out. I owed it to myself; I owed it to him.
The e-mail was cordial, upbeat, instructive without condescension, but between the lines seethed the white-hot wrath of a lifelong stickler. I hesitated long and hard before hitting “send.” Hours felt like days as I waited for a reply. Finally, it came: “Okay. Please fix it.”
If only it were that simple. In fact, most of the time you can’t fix it. All you can do to stem The Fury is take the lid off the cauldron and let a little steam escape. Reach out to your fellow sticklers. We will help you shoulder the burden. And if we’re feeling really snarky, we’ll post the gory details in a forthcoming edition of “Editorializing.” So, when Stickler’s Fury strikes, don’t suffer in silence; follow your fingers to
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Do you suffer from Stickler’s Fury? It’s that feeling of uncontrollable rage that overtakes you when you encounter a particularly egregious crime against the language.