I have been collecting a small stable of complaints and decided opinions about the use of one word, uncommon or foreign words that stop the reader and the use of the hyphen and combined words.
First, I deplore the current widespread use – read misuse – of the word plethora. You find it all over these days when five years ago, even two, it was just lurking in the dictionary and never was trotted out. According to one of my favorite books, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, it does not mean mere abundance. It means “excess, overabundance, superabundance, surplus, glut, superfluity, surfeit, profusion, too many, too much, enough and to spare; informal more than one can shake a stick at.” Please, if you have an overwhelming urge to use plethora, use one of the above and be cured.
I was reading with interest an article about the Federal Reserve that was understandable and informative until the writer threw in tranche without italics. I was stumped because there was no context I could use to determine what this word means, and it was the first time I’d come across it in a lifetime of reading anything and everything. I learned it is French and used in structured finance for slice or section and is related to the English trench. Why not use slice or series? Why throw in a technical term in an article intended for a general audience?
Another word I ran across recently is autarky. It is English but again it is a fairly technical word meaning the quality of being self-sufficient and is usually only applied to political or economic systems. It is not even in my favorite thesaurus; I had to resort to web searches, Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster.
I continually these days notice that writers are combining words that should stand alone. They write: “I’ll see you sometime.” What they mean is: “I’ll see you at some time.” Sometime is appropriate in phrases like “love is a sometime thing.” See how many other instances of word combinations you find in your newspaper.
Finally, writers seem to think that words need to be hyphenated rather than standing by themselves. Yes, it was a hard-fought battle but the battle was hard fought.
I know, I know. It is the sad song of a purist, someone who believes that words mean something and should be handled with care, even coddled. Just indulge me.
