The Gaffe (or Boner or Clunker or Howler)
Developing your word inventory is best done by reading good literature rather than a thesaurus.
The Fix
The Passage
This is taken from a blogpost entitled “Finding Top Talent: Stop Looking Inside a Box for People Thinking Outside of One.” The blogger was offered a good job opportunity in San Francisco but was conflicted because she had worked hard to put together her remote job. She expressed her mixed feelings this way:
Despite having spent over 10 months looking for the “right” remote job back in 2015 and now living the life I had long envisioned, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t seriously consider the switch. The lure of money, connections, and “the valley” was cogent.
[The bolding is ours.]
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Cogent?
This passage reads quite well until the last word. The word “cogent” is typically reserved as a descriptor for an argument. An argument is cogent if it is well-reasoned and logical.
We think of a “usage gaffe” as one that jumps off the page when it’s read. This writer’s use of cogent here qualifies as a gaffe.
What about this revision:
The money, connections, and lure of “the valley” were tempting.
Odds and Ends
H L Mencken on the Differences in American and British English
H L Mencken (1880–1956), the “Sage of Baltimore,” was a well-known American journalist and public philosopher. Here is a paragraph from his 1921 book The American Language on the differences in American and British usage:
The differences here listed, most of them between words in everyday employment, are but examples of a divergence in usage which extends to every department of daily life. In his business, in his journeys from his home to his office, in his dealings with his family and servants, in his sports and amusements, in his politics and even in his religion the American uses, not only words and phrases, but whole syntactical constructions, that are unintelligible to the Englishman, or intelligible only after laborious consideration. A familiar anecdote offers an example in miniature. It concerns a young American woman living in a region of prolific orchards who is asked by a visiting Englishman what the residents do with so much frut [sic]. Her reply is a pun: “We eat all we can, and what we can’t we can.” This answer would mystify most Englishmen, for in the first place it involves the use of the flat American a in can’t and in the second place it applies an unfamiliar name to the vessel that the Englishman knows as a tin, and then adds to the confusion by deriving a verb from the substantive.
Mencken goes on to identify a large number of differences in usage in the rest of the passage which can be found at
https://www.bartleby.com/185/19.html
We think Oscar Wilde summarized Mencken’s point quite well with this: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”
Most of us are of the view that language change is slow, even glacial. But here is great evidence that change occurs more quickly than we think. Bear in mind that the span of time between The Mayflower (1620) and 1921 when Mencken wrote the piece was only 300 years. It’s interesting to speculate on what the two languages (British English versus American English) will look like a thousand years from now. But is it possible that McLuhan’s “global village” made possible by the internet will push the two languages closer together rather than further apart? Time will tell.
Phrase of the Week
We’ll end this post with more wisdom from Oscar Wilde unspoiled by our commentary:
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
I am Irish by race but the English have condemned me to talk the language of Shakespeare.