Gammatical Errors

I am a wordsmith, since I write constantly, but I also listen to others who speak for a living. That includes radio talk show hosts, politicians, and all manner of public speakers. I am always amazed at how poorly some of them use the English language.

Let me give a few examples. President George W. Bush was criticized for the way he strung words together, and two famous ones were ‘nuclear,’ which he pronounced ‘nucular,’ and ‘resonate,’ which he said ‘resignate.’
(Well, there were a lot of people who truly wanted him to ‘resignate,’ but that’s another column altogether)

President Jimmy Carter—I have to be fair and equal here—also had a mispronunciation of ‘nuclear.’ He pronounced it as ‘nucear,’ closer, but still not correct. Mr. Carter was a commander on a ‘nucear submarine,’ so he really should have known better.

Rush Limbaugh, who fashions himself as a “professional” speaker, likes to mispronounce words for laughs. He even invents words, like ‘feminazi.’ There is one word that Limbaugh uses which drives me to distraction, because it was copied from an early Bush-43 speech, but has little or no relevance today. The word is ‘strategery’ (strategy is the word it mimics). He has several others, but that one is a killer, and he uses it almost daily on his show.

Another word that Rush Limbaugh misused—and I listened very closely to make sure—was ‘conscience.’ He was talking about some new laws that Congress had passed regarding health care providers. They are broadly termed as ‘the conscience laws,’ but Limbaugh instead called them ‘the conscious laws.’ He pronounced it that way about a half-dozen times in the space of five minutes.

I caught Rush using another “close, but not right” word during a recent show. He was referring to a tenet, a doctrine or a belief held as the truth by a certain group. However, he pronounced the word as “tenant,” a word with a totally different meaning. He used it twice in a row, so I listened closely the second time to be sure.

Rush also loves to use the word ‘orifice’ in place of ‘office’ when he talks about those politicians in Washington. It originally was meant to make light of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and targeted the Oval Office as the Oval Orifice. I suppose it was funny at one time, but it is boring and distracting now, and has completely lost its original context.

I don’t like to have to pick on Rush Limbaugh, since so many others do it all the time, but I truly believe he has incorporated those “funny” words into his vocabulary. He never pronounces them correctly anymore.

Of course, there are several word endings that make no sense at all but are used in everyday speech by newscasters and others. One such is ‘cy’ added to the end of a word like relevance. There are numerous examples of this in such words as consistence, abstinence and permanence.

Then there are words that end in ‘-ic’ but have ‘ical’ placed on them instead. Magic and historic are examples. I have traveled Interstate 40 between the towns of Tucumcari and Santa Rosa, New Mexico many times, and I always see the sign along the road that refers to “historical route 66,” the original road that I-40 replaced.

I’ve managed to criticize several important people in this column, but it doesn’t mean I like them any more or less for their grammar. I just wish they would “get it right!”