Devolution toward Simpler

Devolution of “prescription drug”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

I was waiting in a pharmacy line the other day when I started thinking about the devolution of the phrase “prescription drug”.

Americans used to go to pharmacies to pick up “prescription drugs”.

But it is rare to hear any of them say that phrase today.

Now we call these drugs simply “prescriptions”.

But a “prescription” is what a doctor writes or makes.

So it must sound odd to many non-Americans to hear an American telling a pharmacist that he or she wants “to pick up my prescription”, when what the person actually wants to do is to pick up the drug, not what the doctor wrote.

The truncation, if you will, of the phrase “prescription drug” into the noun “prescription” is only the first step in the phrase’s devolution.

The second step comes in many American hospitals.

I was telling my brother, who has been an operating-room technician, about this devolution, and he said that many American hospital employees do not even call the drug a “prescription”.

No, they refer to such a drug by the noun “script” — the six letters in the middle of the noun “prescription”.

So there you have it: “prescription drug” devolved to “prescription”, which devolved to “script”.

I wonder what is next — a “scri”?

“bedroom suit”

Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Nouns

I have heard this phrase a lot.

Problem:
It is not a “suit”!

Explanation:
What the heck is a “bedroom suit”?

For that matter, what is a “living-room suit” or a “dining-room suit”?

Okay, I am kidding.

I know what these phrases mean.

I know what the people who say or write them are doing.

They are mispronouncing or misspelling the noun that means a furniture set, most particularly the set of furniture necessary to furnish one room.

That noun is “suite” — NOT “suit”! Talk about NOT Hooked on Phonics.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “bedroom suit” — 9,980,000 matches
  • “bedroom suite” — 9,520,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have favored the incorrect noun over the correct noun by a ratio of 1.05-to-1, which is horrible!

I believe that the favoring of “bedroom suit” over “bedroom suite” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to write and pronounce the four-letter, one-syllable “suit” than it is to write and pronounce the five-letter, 1.5-syllable “suite”.

Solution:
“bedroom suite”

“where we’re at”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Prepositions

I hear this a lot, often from supposedly educated people.

Problem:
The preposition should not appear in this expression.

Explanation:
The full sentence goes something along the lines of “Let’s see where we’re at in this project.”

Whoever says or writes “where we’re at” is making the common English blunder of applying “where at” — a mistaken way to use “where” — to a location (physical or virtual).

I believe that this expression when spoken is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say “where we’re at” than to say “where we are”.

Try saying each expression. You will hear and feel what I mean. The words “we’re” and “at” blur together in speech to become a one-and-a-half-syllable “whurrat”. In contrast, the words “we” and “are” must be spoken distinctly.

Given a choice, most speakers will choose 1.5 syllables over two syllables almost any day, especially in informal speech.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “where we are” — 17,400,000 matches
  • “where we’re at” — 479,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “where we are” versus the incorrect “where we’re at” by a ratio of 36.3-to-1, which is good but not wonderful, especially considering nearly half of a million instances of the incorrect expression.

Solution:
“where we are”