Now comes an interesting exercise both in language and in democracy, which reader Jeff Rasmussen kindly alerted me to. You see, in the formal democratic world, one places a proposed change before the public by circulating a petition. If enough people sign, then onto the ballot the proposal goes, and we vote. If people want to change the spelling of stationery (the writing paraphernalia) to stationary, they sign a petition and we vote. Well, we don’t vote, other than by our usage. But now we can sign a petition.

If you agree that stationary should become the proper spelling of both the paper goods and the adjective communicating motionlessness, then hop on over to iPetitions and support it with your John Hancock and your JohnHancock@JohnHancock.opining address. The petitioners explain:

The word “stationery” however was originally spelled with an “a” in English. It derived from the fact that such products were sold in “stationary” shops and not from travelling peddlers. Both spelling derive from the Latin stationarius defined as a place where something is located.

I know that the same folks who complain that it’s O before 7 except after a dipthong will shout that the difference in spelling communicates the difference in meaning, which is often a valid reason to discreetly retain discrete spellings. On the other hand, in this case one word is an adjective and the other a noun, so context will always clarify more quickly than spelling. And the truly technical folk will argue that stationery perhaps didn’t evolve directly from stationarious (as in the wares of a stationary store), but with lineage once removed—in that the person operating from a stationary location known as a station was a stationer, and therefore the adjective “stationery wares,” which know is known as stationery.

Doesn’t matter. One is a noun even though it was once an adjective, and the other remains an adjective. We could spell either or both as ieou7aer and still know what they mean.

Even so, on this particular ballot, I believe I shall take the reactionary stance and side with those who want to maintain the current spelling. Or would that be the reactionery stance?

I’m talking about the the Scroogely denial of English’s gifted ability to bestow life to nouns, creating verbs in the process. Gift-noun begats gift-verb begats whining from the persnickitorial language Scrooges, who have real misgiftings about such conversion.

Do these people challenge the word gifted as applied, for instance, to prodigies? Should those endowed with special abilities instead be givended? Or something? Should the relay-baton present be regifted or regave? In each case, I believe I’ll stick with the former.

The American Heritage Book of English Usage notes:

Unfortunately, the use of gift as a verb in Modern English is tainted by its association with the language of advertising and publicity (as in Gift her with this copper warming plate).

Fair enough, particularly when commercialism has tainted the strings-attached noun gift so often that the phrase “free gift” is an almost required redundancy. But the real tragedy of the above example is the possibility of someone thinking a copper warming plate might be a romantic gift.

The language Scrooges are a bit more pointed than American Heritage. For example: “Using gift as a verb is a sign of stupidity, laziness, and verbal sloppiness.” And denying its use as a verb is a sign of not just persnickitorial intolerance but also of denying a basic writing principle: The right word is the right word. Certainly, using the lightning-rod gift when give is the right word is frown-upon-able. “Don’t gift in! I’ll gift you a call later!” But there are instances when gift, with its almost legal nuance, can be a more precise and powerful word than its suggested synonyms. Consider:

• Smith will gift the deed to the university. Formal, with implications of recorded transactions and tax benefits.
• Smith will give the deed to the university. “Here ya are. Don’t need it anymore.”
• Smith will bestow the deed to (upon?) the university. With puffed-up chest and “Pomp and Circumstance” playing in the background.
• Smith will bequeathe the deed to the university. Hinting of magnanimity, but without quite the formality of the first instance.
• Smith will donate the deed to the university. Comments similar to that of bequeathe.
• Smith will make a gift of the deed to the university. Only if Smith is trying to compensate for failing the writing course that instructed students to avoid passive, wordy and, yes, verbally sloppy phrasings.

And so this Ghost of Christmas Past turns back a page or two to quote not Dickens but Henry Fielding in Tom Jones, A Foundling (Book 1, Chapter 5): “As this is one of those deep observations which very few readers can be supposed capable of making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them my assistance; but this is a favour rarely to be expected in the course of my work. Indeed, I shall seldom or never so indulge him, unless in such instances as this, where nothing but the inspiration with which we writers are gifted, can possibly enable any one to make the discovery.”

Sure, there are plenty of ways to abuse gift. But sometimes, like the noun at Christmas, it’s best to accept it with grace and gratitude.

Those reactionaries are the folks I call the persnickitors, the ones whose blood pressure approaches geyser strength when they spot language use they consider wrong. Their certain target:

I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

“It’s not enormity!” they will spout. “It’s enormousness! What an egregious language error!” And indeed, enormity is regularly misused to indicate massive size when its actual meaning is “gross or monstrous offense or crime.”

But it is, after all, a time of change. I prefer that we use enormity in its most powerful meaning, yet I concede that the word’s meaning might very well be changing. Because it already has changed.

Enormous and enormity of course result from the same roots, meaning “outside the norm,” a figurative use of norm, meaning “a mason’s pattern.” The original meaning of enormity was, on the order of enormous, a less-harsh “something outside the norm.” And, by the way, one meaning of enormous in its original use was “outrageously outside the norm, monstrous, or shocking.”

So is using enormity to mean enormousness an egregious error? To many, it is. But to that many, I’ll also point out that egregious (in an ancient instance of e- prefixes having nothing to do with internet commerce or mail) comes from Latin roots meaning “outside the herd”—and it originally meant “remarkably good.”

Language changes.

The Republicans’ attempt to make the case that Barack Obama is hoity-toity and they’re hoi polloi has fallen under the sheer weight of the stunning numbers

That’s Maureen Dowd. Hoi polloi from the Greek literally means “the many.” Hoity-toity, a duplicative (think flimflam, dillydally, etc.) means, to put it informally, “all uppity and stuff.” And Dowd gets them both right.

Hoi polloi is often misused to mean the phrase’s very opposite—”the elite”—likely because of comparison or confusion with the similar-sounding hoity-toity. In an odd way, hoity-toity has experienced a similar reversal, though in the opposite direction. Hoity-toity, meaning “putting on airs” in a mocking sense, results from the verb hoit, which means, roughly, “to act the hoyden”—to be rude and boorish. Which is an accusation that the hoity-toity might be prone to assign to the hoi polloi.

(And if you persnickitors are going to grouse that “the hoi polloi” is redundant, bring it on. I’m ready for you.)

There are a lot of arguments bandied about as rationales for any given grammar prescription. Most of them are spurious, but a few have some merit. . . . the best way to refute a prescriptivist’s argument is to simultaneously show them that their argument is ill-founded, but even if they persist with that ill-founded argument, they’re still wrong.

My favorite summation in the list of Arguments: “Language is not math.” To which I cheer, “Hear! Hear!” (in rhyme, no less).

Read. Enjoy. And join me in cheering.

• Use exclamation points sparingly. As I’ve often said, two exclamation points side by side resemble the crutches that they are.
• Always jam a hyphen into the anal-retentive. As I’ve mentioned before, the slogan “There is a hyphen in anal-retentive” (which persnickitors know well, as many of them walk as if the hyphen is firmly placed in personal regions) is available on T-shirts and other paraphernalia at nationalpunctuationday.com.
• Ignore persnickitors who demand elliptical adherence to the rule that ellipses are used only to indicate deleted words. Punctuation began as a timing device . . . cheer the beauty of ellipses as a timing element, particularly when you want a sentence to trail off with an unstated implication . . .
• Adhere to the rule that “Apostrophe use must be organic.” The technical use of the apostrophe is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “The aggregation of protoplasm and chlorophyll-grains on the cell-walls adjacent to other cells, as opposed to epistrophe when they collect on the free cell-walls.” So when a persnickitor screams about it’s as a possessive, just open to the biggest dictionary in the world and point to this page that . . . oh, sorry, I was looking at the wrong page.
• Remember that colons are poorly stacked ellipses. The third spilled ellipsis rolled around until it stopped, and became a period. None of this is true and has nothing to do with punctuation, but the idea is fun to remember, anyway.
• Use quotation to, um, quote. Quotation marks quote and quotation marks mock in varying degrees. Quotation marks do not shout.
• Ponder upon the fact that slash marks are technically known as “virgules.” People who point this out are technically known as “language geeks.” (Doesn’t a virgule sound like an evil supernatural creature in a Laurell Hamilton novel? They could be supernatural slashers! . . . )
• Always punctuate National Punctuation Day with a ® symbol. Cuz.
• Never start a sentence with a comma. Except for sometimes.

But, alas, you’re probably behind on your shopping for National Punctuation Day, right around the corner on Sept. 24th. Not me. I’ve already erected my punctuation tree. I have to admit to using a dollar sign ($) instead of the traditional whatchamacallit-A (Å) for my tree. Yes, the tree I use is artificial, but it’s so much easier to erect and store than the natural trees, and either way, the most important moment is topping the tree with that little star (which all you Punctuation Day carolers know from “O Aster Isk of Bethlehem”). I’ve decorated the front of the house with strings of comma lights (my wife claims that they are actually BBQ-themed lights in the shape of red peppers, but I think she has an overactive imagination). Oh, and the ampersands are hung o’er the fireplace with care in hopes that Santubordinate Clause soon will be there.

This National Punctuation Day, I’m hoping to find a special T-shirt under the punctuation tree. It says “Is there a hyphen in anal-retentive?”, and unlike my silliness above, that very T-shirt exists. It’s one of several fun products from the official National Punctuation Day web site. Such slogans are available on greeting cards, posters and “latte mugs” in addition to T-shirts. Delight your beloved anal-retentive persnickitors with such a goodie on Punctuation Day morning or Punctuation Day eve, depending on your individual traditions.

However, beware that Punctuation Day celebrants sometimes have vastly different belief systems. More on that anon, as we approach the big day, baking our period-shaped Punctuation Day cookies and popping popcorn for the tree’s ellipses garlands….

I feel no pain in splitting infinitives. In fact, I’m among the many to vigorously ignore this “rule,” which was thrust upon the language by admirers of Latin. Their thinking went something along these lines: Latin infinitives are single words, and you can’t split a single word, can you? (Umm, you abso-frikken-lutely can split single words.)

My continuing rant about split-infinitive persnickitors was rekindled when, while skimming The Online Dictionary of Language Terminology, I came upon an entry for a term I hadn’t heard before:

compound split infinitive
Definition: A split infinitive that has been split by a multi-word phrase.
Example: Try to never ever split your infinitives.

Three reactions:

• I cheer the matched form and content. In the example, the infinitive is to split and the phrase that splits it is never ever.
• I suggest that “splitting an infinitive with another split infinitive” would be a cuter but increasingly stupid definition of “compound infinitive.” (Example: “Mr. Brohaugh, I dare you to, with your unwillingness to glibly follow every grammatical edict, give a damn.”)
• I sigh over the fact that the entry exists in the first place. Splitting infinitives is apparently so bad that if you do it with two words, the egregious indiscretion deserves a name unto itself. (And possible jail time!)

I just hope that, now that I’ve introduced some folks to the acceptability of even compound split infinitives, some persnickitor out there hasn’t begun thinking about introducing me to a compound fracture.

Hold on, Mr. Brohaugh, I hear some data-R-us prescriptivist saying. You should say, “stamina is required.” The word is singular.

That’s what I thought until I stumbled across a fascinating post in the Languagehat blog archives (which the “Stupid Grammar Rules II: Data Are” post at the Motivated Grammar blog pointed to). Languagehat explains that stamina is technically plural, and then concludes:

Heretofore, when encountering people who insist that data should take a plural verb, I have said “I presume, then, you feel the same about agenda“; I will now add stamina to my arsenal.

My own heretofore has rarely taken such a logical route. I like to confuse such insistent people, with a response more like “So, then, why don’t you insist on a plural verb for minutia, which is the plural of minutium?” I love the moment of quiet, the eyes darting back and forth. It’s a test of mettle—or mental stamins, maybe. The response is going to be a) silence; b) “I do use plural verbs with minutia“; c) “You’re full of shit.”

Answer a) speaks to the confusion caused by such Latin words as datum/data, stadium/stadia, graffito/graffiti, and balonum/baloney (well, maybe not the last pair). Answer b) speaks to the “depth” of their knowledge of Latin words, because . . . Answer c) is correct. Minutia is indeed singular, and minutium exists only in my mind as a contender for being the singular of baloney.

Well, so goes the chant of the persnickitors. If you want to see a spray of blood popping from foreheads not unlike the famed Bellagio fountain display, just announce aloud that something is “very unique” in just about any public place. “Every English or journalism major knows the word ‘unique’ does not take a modifier!” Which is something I didn’t make up, but quoted directly from a blog, inserting the exclamation point because I knew the blogger really wanted to use one, so I’ll take the blame.

Of course, this proscription is bull (read the title of this blog again). What if I say something is “almost” unique? It’s pretty distinctive, but it does share characteristics with another instance of same. Has not unique been modified? You can say “I almost won the game” even when I actually lost, so why can’t something fail to be one-of-a-kind? Or how about “remarkably unique,” “fascinatingly unique,” “preposterously unique,” “strangely unique,” “etceterally unique.” Modifications all. In fact, the little forehead-popping that I quoted above (assisting gallantly by my offered exclamation point) was inspired by a headline reading, “A truly unique collection.” This construction violates neither logic nor grammar, and not even what “every English or journalism major knows.” Consider this concocted extension of that quote: “This truly unique collection, as opposed to collections that previously laid false claim to being unique  . .”

At worst, truly in my modification is redundant, in that the “as opposed to” phrase demonstrates contrast, so “A unique collection as opposed to . . .” Even so, truly serves as clarifier and intensifier.

What our persnickitor is objecting to is not modification but a specific type of modification—establishing degree of uniqueness. The cliche analogy, of course, is “Unique is or it isn’t, just like you can’t be a little pregnant.” On the other hand, how often do you hear the acceptable hyperbole that someone is very pregnant—that is, she is far along in her pregnancy, possibly about to go into labor at any moment, and . . . look at that . . . time for the cigars. Sure, “very pregnant” isn’t precise; what hyperbole is?

And with that, I’ll sign off (very off), because I don’t want to beat the subject until it’s morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably, not merely, really most sincerely dead.