Kirk Mahoney . com

Americans would say any of these statements:

* “Are you going to church?”

* “He went to school.”

* “They drove to town.”

But nearly no American would say, “She went to hospital.”

Nearly all Americans would say instead, “She went to the hospital.”

In contrast, probably everyone from Great Britain would say, “She went to hospital.”

What fascinates me is that Americans use “the hospital” — with the definite article “the” — to refer vaguely to any hospital, just as they use “church” or “school” or “town” without the definite article “the” to refer vaguely to any church, school, or town, respectively.

Telephone companies refer to an entry in a telephone book as a “listing”.

Real-estate agents refer to an item in a list of for-sale properties as a “listing”.

But the noun “listing” describes the process of creating a list.

I wonder why such an entry in a list is not called a “listed” instead.

The word “listed” makes as much sense as the word “listing” to refer to an entry in a list.

Perhaps the use of “listing” in place of “listed” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

After all, it is simpler to say “listing” than it is to say “listed”.

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google for “It is a quality product.” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 30,100 exact matches.

But this statement means nothing except for the positive implication that speakers and writers want to give it.

Someone usually says “It is a quality product.” to tell the listener that “it” is a high-quality product.

But the noun “quality” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “It is a quality product.”?

This statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “quality” must be hyphenated with an adjective to form a compound adjective that can indicate the value of the noun — in this case, “product” — that the compound adjective modifies.

In contrast to the inherently meaningless statement “It is a quality product.”, here are some meaningful statements:

• “It is a high-quality product.”
• “It is a low-quality product.”
• “It is a good-quality product.”
• “It is a bad-quality product.”

So respond with a “Huh?” the next time that someone says to you a statement such as “It is a quality product.”, and see what happens.

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google for “You have an attitude.” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 46,200 matches.

But this statement means nothing except for the negative connotation beneath its euphemistic form.

Someone usually says “You have an attitude.” to tell the listener that he or she has a bad or negative attitude.

But the noun “attitude” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “You have an attitude.”?

The statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “attitude” must be modified by an adjective to give it value.

Otherwise, you are speaking in euphemisms.

When I saw this morning that today was March 15, I thought of the statement “Beware the ides of March.”

This statement, which refers to the 15th of March, is from a soothsayer in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.

But I still wondered about the origin of the plural noun “ides”, so I looked up the word at dictionary.com.

And I learned a few things.

• The word “ides” is from the ancient Roman calendar and dates back to approximately 1330.
• The word “ides” refers not only to the 15th of March but also to the 15th of May, July, and October.
• The word “ides” refers to the 13th of every other month in the ancient Roman calendar.
• Eight days in each month collectively are known as the ides, but only the final one (e.g., the 15th of March) gets to be called specifically the “ides” of that month. The day before a month’s “ides” day is called “the day before the ides”, two days before a month’s “ides” day can be called “two days before the ides”, and so on.

Snooping around the Web some more, I learned that astrologists also care about the ides.

So now I am wondering whether we should be careful about May 15, July 15, and October 15, too.

That is what I get for being inquisitive!

The U.S. Congress has been in the news a lot recently, creating bills to spend hundreds of billions of dollars here and hundreds of billions more there.

And I have been thinking about the noun “congressman” as a title.

The U.S. Congress comprises two branches: the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

So technically a “congressman” or “congresswoman” is either a U.S. Senator or a U.S. Representative.

But do not dare called a U.S. Senator by the title “Congressman” or “Congresswoman”; oh, the horror!

No, a U.S. Senator with the surname “Hotair” wants to be called “Senator Hotair”, not “Congressman Hotair” or “Congresswoman Hotair”.

In contrast, a U.S. Representative with the surname “Hotair” typically prefers to be called “Congressman Hotair” or “Congresswoman Hotair”, not “Representative Hotair”.

I suspect that part of this is because the word “congress” often refers to the U.S. legislative branch and not to a state legislative branch, whereas the word “representative” is often used to refer to elected officials in state legislative branches and is much less commonly used to refer to elected officials in the U.S. House of Representatives.

So “congressman” (or “congresswoman”) is more prestigious because it is more often associated with a higher position (the U.S. legislative branch) than is “representative” (applicable to many, but not all, state legislative branches).

But I also believe that “congressman” is more popular than “representative” in modern American English because it is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say the three-syllable “congressman” than it is to say the five-syllable “representative”.

In contrast, but consistent with my hypothesis, because the five-syllable “representative” is only slightly more complex than the four-syllable “congresswoman”, we tend to hear and see “Representative” almost as often as “Congresswoman” in reference to female members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

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”?

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”

The noun “gander” is often heard in sentences such as “I’ll take a gander at it.”

I wondered about this use of the noun, so I checked a dictionary.

The primary meaning of “gander” is male of any goose species.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the slang use of “gander” to mean glance comes from the image of someone taking a long look, as if craning his or her neck like a goose (or sex-specifically a gander).

Apparently this slang use of “gander” was first recorded in 1887.

I then wondered why “gander” instead of “goose” — which specifically refers to the female of any goose species — became popular as the slang form of the noun “glance”, so I did some more research.

Apparently “I’ll take a goose at it.” did not have a chance because seven years earlier — in 1880 — the slang use of “goose” as a poke between the buttocks to startle first appeared.

Conclusion: Be sure you know your “goose” from your “gander” when using these words in slang!

Have you ever heard someone say something similar to “The company made a quantum leap in productivity this past quarter.”, as if trying to say that a lot of progress was made?

I do not know the origin of the phrase “quantum leap”, but you should know that this euphemism, which is especially popular in American business, is essentially a self-negation.

The classic definition of the noun “quantum” is the smallest quantity of radiant energy that can exist independently.

A “quantum” in physics is the energy that is equal to the frequency of the associated radiation times Planck’s constant.

And a “quantum leap” refers to the discontinuous, instantaneous jump of an electron in an atom from one quantum state to another.

So taking a “quantum leap” truly refers to taking the smallest leap possible — not exactly what most Americans mean when they say it.

I suspect that many people misapply the phrase “quantum leap” so that they can sound smarter.

But they end up sounding a bit ignorant or pompous to anyone who has been exposed to even a little bit of modern physics.