Number 78
One of my Japanese students asked me if it's usual for Americans to say "Fantastic!" and otherwise exaggerate in ordinary situations, and when I said "Absolutely!", asked me why. (His training supervisor had said "Fantastic!" when he accomplished an extremely simple task.) I'm always ready to concoct answers if I don't have one ready, so I serve them up to you here.
First, I said, American literary humor has a tradition of exaggeration, the tall tale, in contrast to British humorous understatement, for example. In Roughing It, Mark Twain wrote of his true adventures out West, but not 100% literally, as when a wounded buffalo chased a man up a tree ~ and then followed him up the tree. The British, in contrast, are supposed to have referred to World War II as "that spot of bother."
Second, though the tall tale may have continued into the present, I don't think that's the direct source of our current tendency to exaggerate. The most powerful influence on our thinking and speech in the last century is probably advertising, in print and on TV. Everything has to be new, better, fastest, merely to engage our attention. If your detergent is "as good as ever," it isn't good enough to compete.
Third, we've been deluged with feel-good pop psychology for the last few decades. From grade school on up, little Johnny and Janey must not be discouraged even if they think two plus two equals five. Years later, if your boss isn't a total SOB (or DOB), he (or she) wants to make sure you're not debilitated by a clear explanation of what you've done wrong. With that line of reasoning, you could be "fantastic!" all the way to the unemployment office.
Fourth, and more cheerfully, Americans like to be upbeat, can-do, optimistic. This is a good quality and a strength. It's fantastic. Absolutely.
On TV: Someone attacked something (a movie? Bill Clinton's new book?) as "treacle," but pronounced it "tree-ackle." (Maybe he was thinking of "debacle"?) Wrong. It's "treekel" just as I always thought. That's what the British call molasses, but also what we call saccharine ~ too sweet or sentimental, but saccharine also implies artificiality, of course.
I thought for sure I must have written about this one before, but apparently not. I hope it's not too late. "Preventative" is offered in dictionaries as either an alternative or an incorrect version of "preventive" but be assured that it is incorrect. We don't say "preventation" so I don't know how "preventative" got a foothold in so many people's minds, if such an image is tenable. How would "inventative" sound? I really shouldn't be throwing out these possibilities ~ they might land on perversely fertile soil.
A guy calling a radio show to rant about education, who identified himself as a teacher, said, "Let's not jump to the gun." Judging from the context, I don't think he meant "let's not resort to violence." The cliché he was reaching for is "jump the gun," which means to get ahead of oneself, like a racer who starts running before the starting pistol is fired.
An easy way to recognize English from a non-native speaker is the use or misuse of articles and prepositions, but Americans often have trouble with prepositions too. I heard someone (on TV) speak of "the house you've always dreamed for." We dream of things and about things, but not for things. If only it were that easy. Could have been a brain glitch*. I had one myself the other day, and no wonder ~ the front yard of a nearby house has been filled with lawn flamingos, not the plastic kind but painted wooden ones ~ and I said, "Look! That lawn is full of penguins!" I certainly do not confuse penguins with flamingos, natural or artificial; I can't explain it. But I don't think I'd talk about dreaming for something. (No, I wasn't dreaming about flamingos or penguins, let alone for them.)
In what I thought was another prepositional fumble, a TV journalist said, "Spaceshipone was designed and built by scaled composites." Too scary, if true, and I thought surely she meant "of scaled composites." But a Web search revealed that Scaled Composites is the name of the company that built this weird vehicle.
*Glitch: I just learned that glitch is a Yiddish word, but now officially means an interruption in electronic or mental operations. Then I learned that a Heisenbug is "a bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it."
If you haven't seen the cartoon "Agnes" by Tony Cochran, do yourself a favor and look it up online and read all the archived strips. Today Agnes says, "I am going to do nothing" then her friend says, "You're not going to do anything?" then Agnes says, "That is the negative way to say it . . . I prefer the positive and upbeat phraseology, 'I am going to do nothing'." She is quite right.
One of the BushCheneyRumsfolk said regarding talks about what to do with Saddam Hussein after the official handing over of the keys, "I wouldn't call it negotiations. I'd call it discussions." This could mean it's a non-negotiable issue.
A letter to the editor asks why some people are "more concerned about law-abiding citizens than they are about terrorists." "Concern" really is not interchangeable with "worry," as this example shows. It should suggest more care than fear. This is one reason it bothers me when people say "I have a concern about . . . " when they mean there's a problem."
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