The Leaf Blower Awards

Following are some words and expressions that generally sound awful -- the verbal equivalent of that seasonal suburban nightmare: the leaf blower. For that reason, I will be awarding “leaf blower” points on a scale of offensiveness, with 4 being the highest.

“Irregardless” (4 leaf blowers)

(Q) One reader, Bev from Virginia, writes, “My pet peeve is the use of the word ‘irregardless.’ I hear it daily. It drives me nuts. I'm counting on you to set people straight.”
(A) Well, Bev, a lot of people agree with you: when I googled that one little word, up sprang hundreds of sites, many with page-long articles about how offensive and illogical “irregardless” is; how it is nonstandard and “humorous” English to be avoided in formal writing; and that we should blame some western Indiana dialect for first using it back in 1912, probably meshing “irrespective” (meaning, without regard to something) and “regardless,” (meaning, in spite of something). “Regardless” is the correct word.

Some individual sites claim that “irregardless” is not a word, while others say that given how long the word has been around, and how often it is still used in speech and print, that sadly, yes, it IS a word – albeit a second- or even third-class verbal citizen among the better informed.

What makes “irregardless” wrong is that it’s a double negative: the prefix “ir” means “not” and the suffix “less” means “without.” So if “ir” and “less” cancel each other out, what you have is “regard,” which is roughly the opposite of what you meant to say. English, in general, doesn’t do double negatives the way they do in, say, Spanish or French; in those languages you MUST use a double-negative to be correct:

Where we say, “I don’t have anything,” a Spaniard says, “No tengo nada” and a Parisian says, “Je n’ai rien,” which are both literally, “I don’t have nothing.” Not only does this sound uneducated in English, English speakers would reason that if you don’t have “nothing,” then you must have “something.” However, a Yale professor pointed out that we still use dictionary-sanctioned, redundant words like “debone” and “unravel” without any problem.

Linguistically speaking, what may make “IRregardless” so tempting to use is that the syllable stress of that word falls on “IR,” emphasizing the “not” aspect, while in “reGARdless,” the stress falls on the fairly meaningless, “GAR.”

Regardless of such temptations, better go with the standard word until further notice.

Recommended sites re “irregardless” (in addtion to American Heritage and Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, and Wikipedia):
- British etymologist and writer Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words (I once wrote him and he actually responded):
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-irr1.htm
- Get It Write
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/081002.htm
- Plus, the amusingly named, The Irregardless Café, in Raleigh, NC, which has been serving down-home food and disregarding illogical verbal constructions since 1975.
http://www.irregardless.com/cafe.html

“Nothing If Not” (3 leaf blowers)

A particularly faithful reader, my editor and husband, Bob, finds the phrase, “nothing if not,” meaning, “above all” or, simply, “very” -- as in “Bjork is nothing if not quirky” -- to be extremely over-used in writing these days (though, thankfully, people tend not to say it, which spared it a 4-star rating). “Nothing if not” is an old phrase, first coined c. 1600 in Shakespeare’s “Othello:” "I am nothing if not critical," Iago says in Scene 1. As for its over-use, Google listed no less that 1,290,000 different sites for the phrase, among them:

“If The Brown Bunny feels weirdly indulgent, it’s nothing if not a fiercely personal film …”www.deep-focus.com/flicker/brownbun.html

“Guatemala is nothing if not colorful! Here even the ever so mundane American school bus comes dressed like a Las Vegas showgirl … http://www.transportguatemala.com/chicken.htm

“Faulkner was nothing if not confused, and here, alas, the confusion damages the work. Where was that inner editor?
www.amazon.ca/ Light-August-William-Faulkner/dp/1561005886

But what none of this answers to Bob’s satisfaction is why? Are people using that phrase because it’s Shakespeare? (Doubtful.) Why waste one’s breath on the three words, “nothing if not,” if you can easily say the same thing without them? And what, really, does “nothing if not” mean?

Let’s take the sentence, “I am nothing if not perplexed.” Likewise, if I am not perplexed, I am nothing. But if I AM perplexed, then I am NOT nothing -- so I must be SOMEthing. So, in other words, “I am perplexed.”

Yes, “nothing if not” is another double-negative – but this one INTENDS to cancel both negatives, probably to emphasize the positive. Nice, huh? Leave it to Shakespeare. Which is perhaps something to keep in mind: the phrase was good for Iago – such phrases always sound so eloquent the first time – but for the rest of us, now 400 years later and with 1,290,000 site-hits and counting, “nothing if not” is nothing if not as spent as a firecracker on the 5th of July.

“At The End of the Day” (2 1/2 leaf blowers)
I hear this phrase said all the time, in many different contexts: business, between friends, on TV, and even my old linguistics professor, who said it so many times during class, I started to make notches on my notepad. But frankly, my dears, to paraphrase Rhett Butler, I just can’t get worked up about this. However, this attitude clearly sets me outside of the new group of conscientious objectors:

Cindy Adams, a gossip columnist for the New York Post, went ballistic in last Sunday’s (October 15, 2006) paper, suddenly waking up to what she considered the nauseating popularity and ubiquity of “at the end of the day.” Not the Les Miz song (“At the end of the day you’re another day older”) which stayed in my head til the end of the day, after I read Adams’s article; but the “at the end of the day” that means, “finally,” or “in the end,” as in Adams’s own examples: “At the end of the day, all you have is your family;” or “At the end of the day, it’s between you and your Maker.”

Well, we all have our verbal pet peeves and Cindy is certainly not alone with that one, even if she is a bit late in catching on to it: Google sites criticizing the phrase’s over-use go back at least 2 years. Columnist James Clark, writing for The (Johannesburg, South Africa) Star in 2004, said that in a newspaper survey readers voted “at the end of the day” as the Numero Uno, most irritating cliché.

My husband thought that the phrase was mostly used in business contexts, right up there (or down there) with “bottom line.” So I googled “bottom line” and “end of the day” in the same search box and it turned up 1,570, 000 hits. So, yes, Bob – good hunch.

Media Bistro, a site targeted to people in the media industry, had a piece in their August 15, 2006 posting, titled: At The End Of The Day, Study In Hot Pursuit Of Popular Press Clichés Reveals Low-Hanging Fruit. The article reported “a whopping 10,000 news sources, including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and the Associated Press; in an analysis by Factiva of clichés used by the press, by far the most commonly used is ‘at the end of the day.’”

Apparently responding to the same Factiva analysis, on August 17, 2006, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen wrote:

I get excited when people sound as if they are about to emit wisdom. That “end of the day” phrase tunes me up in anticipation of a “Tuesdays With Morrie” -- level insight, something meaningful, something important … Mostly, though, I'm disappointed … In fact, the more banal the thought, the more likely it is to be preceded with “at the end of the day.” You know what I think? I think ‘at the end of the day’ has come to the end of its day.

Okay, okay, so it’s a little over-used. It STILL doesn’t bother me as much as “with he and myself.” (4 leaf blowers)

“A Slight Quiver of the Upper Lip” (0 leaf blowers – it’s a family favorite)

“A slight quiver of the upper lip,” so integral to classic hackneyed romance novels, is a phrase I grew up using and hearing at home – not often, but often enough. It was a type of code used to describe the feeling just after something you wanted (especially, to eat) was suddenly snatched from your grasp. Mom and Dad loved telling the story behind this family classic, and here’s how I remember it:

In 1966, my globe-trotting parents were on a tiny boat on the Amazon tributary’s Araguaya River. The tour guide’s first mate was James, a 28-year-old, lean and rugged, British soldier-of-fortune-type, whose ad-hoc responsibility at the (literal) end of the day was to produce from the tiny, generator-run machine the precious ice cubes for the evening’s libations. These ice cubes, symbols of civilization out there in the steamy jungle, were doled out like gold doubloons.

But one evening, just as the last ice cube was going from Dad’s hand to his glass of scotch, something happened and the ice cube bounced off the rim of the glass, then slipped, skittered and slid – plop – into the muddy river. For a moment, no one spoke. James looked at my father’s face (somewhere between crestfallen and shocked) and, perhaps seeking to relieve the gravity of the moment, piped up, “I say, David! A slight quiver of the upper lip?”

Now there are few things (besides one or two ice cubes) that could make Dad’s warm scotch taste good – and a fine and well-timed cliché, with just the right hint of irony and levity, was one of them.