Enormity of writing errors

Fiction

My wife stumbled across a great book for a spring fiction writers. It is entitled, appropriately, The Fiction Class.

Patterned after herself and her own experience as a writing instructor at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in Manhattan, author Susan Breen's main character is the aspiring writer and fiction writing teacher Arabella Hicks. In each chapter, the book moves from her class, where the assignments provide the setting for the dialogue, to the nursing home where Arabella meets with her mother, with whom she has a strained relationship. At the end of each chapter is an "assignment" for the reader that corresponds with the class's assignment in that chapter. Breen teaches the elements of fiction writing in the midst of a published piece of fiction. What better way to teach them?


Preventative preventive

I wish there were one. Even a fine writer like Victor Davis Hanson, in this week's column, refers to "renditions, preventative detentions, wiretapping and summary deportations ..." Some dictionaries include "preventative" as an alternative to "preventive," but it still grates. I even hear "preventative" used occasionally by medical professionals.


Enormity of the problem

Mona Charen's column this week looks at the evolving English language. "Begs" as used in "begs the question," she points out, means "avoids" or "circumvents." To beg the question is to avoid the issue at hand. But because the phrase has been used incorrectly so often to mean "raises (or prompts) the question," it is now acceptable to use it that way, according to some dictionaries, including the New Oxford Dictionary of English.

The same might be true of "15 items or less," which should, of course, be "15 items or fewer." Charen says that one annoys her adolescent child. (I think the lady in front of me in Wal-Mart yesterday thought it read "15 items or more" since her shopping cart contained at least 30.)

Charen still does not approve using the term "enormity" as a synonym for "enormousness." The term "enormity" means "excessive wickedness, passing all moral bounds." But will she accept it to mean "enormousness" in 10 years, when TV news anchors and politicians have said it that way so often that dictionaries permit it?

And not to beg the question, this begs the question: Should we avoid a common usage error until the language experts tell us it's now acceptable to use it in the popular fashion, or should we instead use the error as frequently as possible to hasten its evolution to acceptability?