"I have feelings for you." I recently watched a TV episode set during World War II in which one character declared to another, "I have feelings for you." In 1980, when my current husband moved in and I went off the love market, that wasn't what people said when they felt emotionally attracted to someone. They didn't say "into you" or "not that into you" either, not for another three or four decades.
"passed away" for "died" I was brought up to say "died" and "dead." I don't know when the euphemism "passed away" took such universal hold, but it's ubiquitous these days, and as both a writer and a shrink, I believe it's a big mistake. Death is a fact for all of us, and being mealy-mouthed about it doesn't help. We're not skittish about anything else these days. Young women rock stars' favorite stage move seems to be writhing around on the floor in costumes in which they look almost naked. We're living in the run-up to either World War III or an unlivable planet without reaching a consensus about doing whatever it takes to stop it. But "dead" is too raw to say aloud.
The present tense is used so frequently these days to tell a story that there's no point in rejecting it. If you're a fiction lover, it would be like throwing every third spoonful into the trash every time you eat a bowl of ice cream. No, what gets to me when some authors use the present tense is what a hash they make of the past tense. The transitions ought to be simple, smooth, and consistent.
I follow the trail of blood into the kitchen, where it drips from the rim of the sink and pools on the floor. The tiles were clean when I entered the room last night.
Instead, too many of them write:
I follow the trail of blood into the kitchen, where it drips from the rim of the sink and pools on the floor. The tiles had been clean when I entered the room last night.
or worse:
The tiles had been clean when I had entered the room last night.
I learned from submissions to the late Marvin Kaye of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine to keep "had" to a minimum. It's a small word, but I've come to agree with Kaye that it's hardly ever needed.
Then there's the twenty-first tendency to use nouns as verbs, creating awkward phrases to replace perfectly good existing locutions. Nero Wolfe couldn't stand the use of "contact" as a verb. The erudite detective (who our own Eve Fisher has suggested might have been a descendant of the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson) once burned a dictionary for allowing "imply" and "infer" to be used interchangeably. "Gifted with" instead of "gave" or "given" would have made him reach for the matches, and "tasked with" instead of "assigned" or "ordered to" would have driven him crazy. I don't like it in a contemporary work of fiction or video. But I go bonkers when a Roman centurion declares, "The legions have been tasked with destroying the Druids."
Oh, Liz, I agree with each and every one of these! I don't require that actors portraying pre-1700s people use Elizabethan pronouns and verb tenses whenever they speak (although I would certainly welcome those as a breath of fresh air in today's political climate - what are your preferred pronouns? "Thee/thou/thy/thine"). But I am sick of "I have feelings for you" (yeah, and so does the dog), etc. And, BTW, if they want to do upper-crust Victorian / Edwardian society, they have got to quit using words like mirror, glasses, cemetery, etc. (See Nancy Mitford's "Noblesse Oblige" and "The Pursuit of Love" for a far more accurate presentation of English as it really was spoken.)
ReplyDeleteInteresting, Eve. Looking glass? Spectacles? Um, graveyard? That one I wasn't aware of.
DeleteThought some more. You mean churchyard, which they still may say in England. I was trying to imagine Nancy Mitford not saying Père Lachaise Cemetery, and she probably did say cemetery in that case, because it's certainly not a churchyard.
DeleteI'm sure that she did say Pere Lachaise Cemetery, but then she spoke fluent French.
DeleteOne reason I make sure the polyglot Mendozas in my historical series don't speak English is to avoid this sort of problem, though I do try to avoid glaring anachronisms in dress and language or mention things that weren't invented till a hundred years later.
DeleteI agree with you wholeheartedly with only one reservation. In the 1950s it was still common for people to say "He passed over," meaning died and gone to heaven. But "passed away" seems to be a non-denominational euphemism that, as you say, avoids a painful truth. I especially loathe "gifted me" for "gave me." My other pet peeve is the obvious one--misuse of pronouns I me, he him, she her, they them. Unlike some, I can't settle back into a story after being jolted out of it by infelicitous phrasing.
ReplyDeleteI never heard anyone say "passed over" in the Fifties, but I probably never heard anyone say "heaven," either. It probably varied depending on region and social, ethnic, and religious factors. For a perspective on the new use of pronouns, I suggest reading some current science fiction, where there's always been gender flexibility and the comfort level decreases the jarring effect. In good writing, the change can be made felicitously or infelicitously, same as when we first started de-sexizing the language in the late 1960s. (I was working at publisher McGraw-Hill, which put out the first handbook on the topic.) Also, for non-binary people, "they" is the singular for-humans widely accepted neutral pronoun the language has needed (and failed to find many times) as long as I can remember. I'm fine with it as long as it's used appropriately. Btw, I've noticed that the Brits seem to have used "everyone...they" for a long time without anyone objecting. Start looking for it in your reading, and you'll see.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth, SO glad I'm not the only one gritting my teeth at these! I'm writing in the 1920s with my current series. I try hard to stay true to the times. And I echo your thoughts on "I'm sorry for your loss." So many said that to me when my husband died decades too soon a few years ago. It made me feel that it was only my loss, and didn't affect the other person at all - they simply didn't care.
ReplyDeleteYes, exactly what I meant, and really a form of "I don't know what to say," which so many people don't realize is horribly insensitive and not what you need to hear. So give a spontaneous hug instead! (But not in the Victorian era or indeed in the 1920s, except in Greenwich Village, maybe.)
ReplyDeleteOh Liz, I have sooo many of these objections. Some are speech, some are technical. How difficult is it to look up when steam locomotives were invented or the World Wide Web developed? Helping to critique an antebellum opus, I pointed out neither slaves nor anyone else drank out of tin cans. Tin cups, maybe, but tin cans didn’t come into use until a century later. The author insisted I had to be wrong. Millennials can’t be blamed for that error.
ReplyDeleteThe present tense problem seems to have risen among the self-pubbers on the theory (a) their exciting story is taking place in real time, and (b) if ‘old’ books used it, then it’s got to be wrong.
Noun-verbs: Party and gift are two that grate on my nerves. Also, “I harshed on him.” And the reverse is true: I’d rather receive an invitation than an invite.
Liz, here’s a non-literary parallel I can’t resist passing on. Girlfriend (who doubles as an aunt) visits family where popcorn and movies are on the agenda. The microwave takes that moment to pass (in the sense of the article above). Young adults are aghast, children appear horrified, and one desperate soul looks up pizza joints on a cell phone.
Auntie mutters nonsense (or more likely another word), and digs through cupboards for a large pot, which she sets on the stove to heat. She tears open packets and dumps popcorn and oil into said pot. Her young relatives gather around the stove and stare at her as if she’s mad. (She is, but that’s a different story.) Suddenly pop! And other pop! Faces light up. The young adults stare suspiciously and insist upon tasting this witch’s concoction before the children.
From then on, Auntie could do no wrong amongst her nephew and nieces. The legend of her dark magic made the pre-teen rounds with lots of, “No! Really?”
Beyond their circle, I don’t expect to read popcorn without microwave anytime soon.
Leigh, my son, now in his early 50s, has many Asian friends (including the one he married). There's a well known joke that goes, "How does an Asian girl make rice? She takes a rice cooker..."
DeleteLiz, Paula inadvertently posted a note to you under my Sunday article. Her comment can be found here.
ReplyDeleteGot it and replied. Thanks, Leigh.
DeleteLove this post. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to throw a book across the room for its glaring anachronisms. I remember one was a Regency Era Romance and it used the word "jog" for running. It was so out of place and wasn't used in that context until 1948; after that all I could see was the other mistakes. I think this was why I also struggled with Greta Gerwig's Little Women; it was well made, but the modern demeanor and phrases, etc, was too jarring for me. Your mention of "passed away" and "sorry for your loss" makes me rethink some of my word choices for my historicals, and I fear I may be guilty of it too. Going to have to up my game. :)
ReplyDeleteNobody's perfect. An Israeli reader wrote to me that I'd goofed about Diego Mendoza wearing his tefillin when he sneaks off to pray in the wilds of Hispaniola on Shabbat. Apparently, that's the one day of the week a Jewish man wears his tallit but leaves the tefillin home. As a New York secular Jew, what do I know? You can't look up something you have no idea is an issue.
DeleteGood to know about all of these, but I know the “passed away” euphemism has been used all my life where I grew up in the Caribbean. Saying “died” or “dead” was considered too blunt. We still use euphemisms, sometimes to our detriment. A few years back, a (very) elderly relative passed away after a few days in the hospital. Another relative called my mother to say that Aunt Sula had “gone home”. My mother reacted happily for a moment, thinking of going home in the literal sense before realizing the relative actually meant Aunt Sula had “gone to her heavenly home”. She was mortified!
ReplyDelete(Ashley Bernier)
As I said in the comments, there are cultural variations.
DeleteI’m afraid I must respectfully disagree with a couple of these.
ReplyDelete“Passed away” has been in use for a long time. Google Ngram viewer and etymologies show ample evidence of this. It’s true, however, that it’s become much, much more common in recent years.
Here’s one example from 1954: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Methodist_Woman/DNneAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22passed+away%22&dq=%22passed+away%22&printsec=frontcover
Same is true for “sorry for your loss.” This example is from 1765. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Yale_Edition_of_Horace_Walpole_s_Cor/bYQGAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22sorry+for+your+loss%22&dq=%22sorry+for+your+loss%22&printsec=frontcover
Aside from cultural differences, it seems to have replaced the simpler, blunt terms completely in whatever passes for general culture as reflected on TV, for example. The middle class, educated New Yorkers among whom I've lived most of my life use the F word with impunity, but most of them have stopped saying "dead," with the exception of a few of my contemporaries, ie oooold.
ReplyDeleteTrue.
Delete