Lexipoeia: Stoppit!
Pure
Alarmism!
By Sam Linton
Posted July 16th, 2007.
Greetings, loyal linguists! Once again, I have returned to offer my sage advice on all things wordly. Before you get all fired up, however, I'm afraid that I have some bad news to impart: this one will not be a column about advancing the language. Quite the opposite, in fact, as I have unfortunately found it necessary to rein some of you in the speaking community in, in (in!) a segment I call "Stoppit!"
Stoppit!
First, a confession: as you may have guessed from the fact that I author a column on how to talk good, I come from a distinguished line of language sticklers. We all in my family have our little linguistic pet peeves: my father's is those who confuse "much" with "many;" my mother's, those who pronounce the word "nauseous" as "nautious" (naw-shuss). I used to think myself free of this familial curse — nitpicking was for nitpickers, and I picked no nits! Those days, however, are lost to me now, for I have found my own nit, and a picky one it is at that. I speak of course, of the inexcusable interchanging of the word "can't" for "won't."
Let me explain: when I'm not writing these columns, being academically lauded or attending movie premieres with television starlets (clue: think Smallville), I work in the capacity of a restauranteur (or something similar) where I see this linguistic sin enacted almost daily. Now, not to harp on the vegans, but they're the ones who tend to be most guilty of this: instead of saying that they "won't" eat animal products, there is a tendency among this group to say that one "can't" eat animal products. Now, the reason that I find this so annoying is not ideological, but linguistic. Every time that can't is used for won't, it cheapens the meaning of can't, until it's brought down to won't's miserable, cowardly level. Not to be alarmist or hyperbolic, but if a trend like this continues, the results could be... deadly.
Suppose, say, for the sake of argument, that you are an underpaid, underappreciated kitchen employee of Christopher P. O'Happyday's Good Time Family Foodstuffs Emporium who has just been told, after already grilling up a veggie burger that you know to contain cheese, that the customer "can't have dairy." You've already made the burger, you have twelve other orders to process, you really dislike your job anyways, and you get enough vegans bugging you about what they "can't" have before you make the order, so you say to yourself, "Fuck it. What Vegan McJones don't know won't hurt 'im." And you let the burger go. Oh no! It turns out that Vegan McJones wasn't vegan after all, but rather someone seriously, lethally lactose intolerant and your dairy-infused veggie burger has killed him or her in the most internally gruesome manner possible, leaving all seven of his or her children orphans, their other parent having perished in an auto-accident the previous week! If only, if only, you hadn't been conditioned to think of the word "can't" as being interchangeable with the word "won't" through repeated exposure in an incorrect context! Alas!
What we need, then, is a campaign of awareness. Look at your own language patterns. Do you know the difference between these two highly different words? Look at your own cognitive patterns. Can you differentiate between physical impossibility and ideological imperative? Can you translate this difference into your everyday speech through proper use of "can't" and "won't?" (Or possibly, "can" and "will?") Can you get others to do likewise? Yes, you'll be a perpetual nag, but you'll be saving lives and, more importantly, saving words! Two words are in rapid danger of entering a crippling merge that will diminish the meaning of both and doom many allergy-afflicted people to grisly deaths on the filthy floors of fast-food chains! Readers and speakers, we cannot allow that to happen. Until next time, remember — it is a living language, but if we don't act, some of us may not live to speak it.