Month: January 2009

“They dotted-line report back to Becky.”

Adverbs, Common English Blunders, Self-negation, Verbs

I overheard this yesterday.

Problem:
The adverb “back” in “report back” is redundant.

Explanation:
The verb “report” comes from the Latin verb “reportare”, which means to carry back.

So the meaning of “report back” would be to carry back back.

Because the “re” in “report” means back, one could argue that those who “report back” would never reach their intended audience.

For fun, I searched Google for the expression “report back” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 3,740,000 matches.

This is depressing.

Solution:
“They dotted-line report to Becky.”

“… wait for you …” vs. “… wait on you …”

Common English Blunders, Prepositions, Verbs, Versus

I often hear one of these expressions when the other one is required.

Problem:
These two expressions are not synonyms.

Explanation:
My wife recently heard a man say, “I will wait on you in the car.”

The preposition “on” bothered her, and we discussed how frequently each of us has heard “wait on” when “wait for” was required.

The common English blunder seems to be to use a form of “wait on” when a form of “wait for” is required.

Someone who “waits on” someone else is acting as a waiter or waitress.

So “I will wait on you in the car.” literally means “I will act as your waiter (or waitress) in the car.”

The man whom my wife heard should have said “I will wait for you in the car.” because that person was not saying that he would act as a waiter in “the car”.

Solution:
Use “… wait on you …” when you are a waiter or waitress; otherwise use “… wait for you …”.

Language Groupthink

Common English Blunders

When it comes to language, beware of “language groupthink”.

Wikipedia says that the term “groupthink” was coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte in the magazine Fortune and that it is “a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas”.

Perhaps I am using the word “groupthink” differently than what Mr. Whyte intended, but I also see groupthink as applicable to the language that a group of people uses.

“Language groupthink” would be my term for this phenomenon.

For example, when I encounter a new acronym and ask people in the group that coined the acronym about that acronym, I often will get the general meaning of the acronym but often will not get the words behind the letters in the acronym.

In other words, a language groupthink overtakes the members of the group to the extent that nobody or almost nobody questions the origins of the group’s acronyms!

Another example relates to a misused word. It is extremely common in the telecommunications industry to use the noun “premise” to refer to a customer’s physical location.

As I wrote fifteen months ago, the correct noun for referring to a location is “premises”, not “premise”.

In other words, a language groupthink apparently overtook the telecommunications industry years ago to the point that many in the industry today continue to use “premise” when they mean “premises”.

You may have encountered other examples of language groupthink. If you have an example that might be of interest to fellow readers of this blog, then please send it to me and let me know whether you want me to give you attribution for the example.

Happy Language Non-Groupthinking!