Abusage

I'd been saving this article on Conveying Emphasis by John McWhorter from the NY Sun. In it, he examines whether quotation marks (found in news articles, I call them scare quotes) are the new boldface. He also discusses how written language adapts and resists verbal usage: Even standard English is used less formally today than it was back in the old days, but there are still limits. Notice how many people say That's a whole nother issue , and how we rarely if ever encounter "whole nother" in print, except if a person is quoted.

At the risk of seeming like a Hidebound McGrumperson, there's a pile of awkward vernacular I hate reading even in dialogue. For me, the casual spoken form of the verb 'to have' when used in the conditional form generates one of the most personally offensive constructions.

Clean and Correct, like a freshly-laundered pillowcase:

I wish I could have pulled the trigger myself.

With careful characterization, I can hear this spoken in my head as a mumble-mouth would, even without the typographical training wheels.

Obnoxious version 1 (best of the worst):

I wish I coulda pulled the trigger myself.

This is my favorite for use in dialogue or first-person POV if the writer's concerned that readers simply won't otherwise understand the quality of expression of a given character. I guess the woulda, coulda, shouldas of sporting disappointments over the years have eroded some of my resistance to it.

Obnoxious version 2 (wha?):

I wish I could 'a (also as could'a) pulled the trigger myself.

This one treats 'could have' like a contraction that's dropped the rest of the word 'have'. It's a fairly logical construction, but looks pretty clumsy since rarely used. If you've read a lot of dialect where 'in' is spelled i', you know how fatiguing this non-standard decrypting can become. Mashing the words together in a real contraction 'could'a' probably woulda been a better idea long ago, but now we've got the other three non-apostrophic messes fairly widely established, let's use them and save the visual strain. Besides, everyone knows the ink for apostrophes is made from the eyes of baby harp seals. Lucky for me, the ink for hyphens and parentheses is made from the celebrity of talentless and arrogant youths. Compound more words, ya'll, and maybe they'll go away.

Obnoxious version 3, and to me the most heinous:

I wish I could of pulled the trigger myself.

I believe I read this formulation in a book by one of the authors I admire most, a writer who is both a tremendous craftsman and MWA Grand Master. I may be misremembering, I got so woozy, but I've seen it. Oh yes, I've seen it. This nasty concoction merely incorrectly transcribes the phonemes coming out of an uneducated person's mouth. To employ three more famously abused homonyms, it doesn't matter to me whether a speaking character would be able to choose the word 'there' or 'their' or 'they're' correctly on the SAT, but a book's creator ought to be able to comprehend the difference. To purposely pick the wrong one in dialogue so as to confuse or irritate readers is inexplicable obscurantism. I expect the writer to communicate accurately what is intended by each character, whether or not Joey the Nostril would be able to scribble it correctly himself.

Similarly, in my personal worst version above, all traces of the verb 'to have' and its meaning are subtracted from the would/could/should equation, and substituted instead is a wholly different and, in this context, senseless word that happens to sound the same. Regular people do this constantly with phrases they've absorbed without the etymology. Thus we see 'towing' not 'toeing the line' and frequently hear things like 'hard roads' not 'hard rows' to hoe. If people who don't claim to be lovers of or merchants in language don't get the distinctions, okay. But for those who claim to be writing professionals, it's just malpractice to pervert clarity of meaning for idiotic gobbledygook out of some misbegotten desire for authenticity.

If you have created characters who speak in slang, way-out jargon, or unusual dialects, this is fair warning that I, as a reader, consider that to be properly your challenge, not mine. A writer can and should work hard enough on the dialogue and description that the character as well as the point gets across, because I'm not willing to suffer the confusing rants of an illiterate idiot. I have my own first drafts to get through, thanks.

Any personal peeves of your own?

P.S. If another of our recent hot topics fanned your flames, there's more heated discussion of Cayenne with Leah at The Goat's Lunch Pail today.