IF I WOULD have known

Readers of Mark Abley’s Watchwords column share their pet peeves over all-too-common misuses of the English language.

Welcome to the week in which righteous indignation stomps all over the misuses of the English language. In my final column of 2013 I asked for your pet peeves and, as always, you delivered. What follows is a sample of your comments.

“My real concern,” George Hilbert wrote, “is the misuse of ‘less’ and ‘fewer.’ So many commentators, some famous, just don’t get it. The worst offender to me is ‘less people.’ ” A good, or rather bad, example comes from the website of CBC Radio’s The Current: “He has 700 snakes as pets and feels that snakes are safe pets and have killed less people than dogs.” Remember, the word “fewer” should be used whenever an item has a plural form: take less salt with your food, and fewer spoonfuls of it.

“Having taught English as a second language,” wrote Evelyn Seligman, “I think of myself as a grammarian. I hope this is not a de- lusion of grandeur. My pet peeve is this: ‘I would have called if I would have known,’ instead of the correct ‘I would have called if I had known.’ This incorrect usage is much too common.” True, and sometimes the confusion leads to a radical shortening: “I knew, I would have called.” Even if the speaker’s meaning is fairly clear in conversation, it’s baffling in writing.

“It’s a lost cause,” lamented Elaine Bander, a retired English professor at Dawson College, “gone south with the subjunctive, but I hate hearing the misapplication of ‘begs the question.’ Why can’t people just say ‘prompts the question’ or ‘suggests the question’? Sigh.” I share the pain. The phrase “begs the ques- tion” should appear not when an issue is being raised but when an answer is circular. A local example: “Why does Montreal have problems with the Mafia? Because the Mafia is powerful in Montreal.”

Linda Merlin hates “grow the business,” a phrase that “from first hearing it until today, I cringe every time someone uses it. I know this is now in common usage but, being a farm girl, I think one grows crops and vegetables.” Indeed, “grow” as a transitive verb once referred only to objects that increased naturally, such as flowers and beards; but today it has burgeoned, especially in business. A 2011 book titled Grow the Entrepreneurial Dream features a remark I find faintly ridiculous: “Real business growth occurs when you can maintain and grow the customers that you have.”

“Recently,” wrote Nancy Rokas, “you did a column on my Number 1 pet peeve: using ‘so’ to begin every sentence. When I hear this abomination I snap off the radio or change the channel on the TV. My Number 2 peeve is ‘I mean,’ which is usually preceded by ‘so.’ Radio host: ‘What inspired you to write the book?’ Author: ‘So, I mean, I’ve always liked cooking ... ’ ”

Roger Jay sent in a few excellent complaints. The first is the widely heard “step foot.” How, he asked, “did ‘set foot,’ as in ‘He never set foot in that restaurant again,’ turn into ‘step foot,’ which makes no linguistic sense?” I suspect the answer is that you step with your feet, whereas setting is closely associated with eyes — nobody says “step eyes on.” He also objected to the overuse of the adjective “surreal,” as in “Working with Harrison Ford on that movie was surreal. Scoring the winner in the shootout was surreal.” “No, it isn’t,” Roger Jay rightly observed. “It’s exciting, unexpected, unusual, a thrill.”

The word that bugged Ron Gelston is “like”: “Most teenagers including my granddaughters use the word ‘like’ to extreme and in the wrong context. It drives me nuts! They come across as being totally incapable of intelligent speech.” Elizabeth Cuthill feels a similar frustration at hearing “conversations( unavoidable on a local bus) peppered with ‘like’ — ‘like you know, I was, like freaked out!’ — often never even completing a sentence. On one short bus trip a young woman used the word 117 times in approximately ten minutes. I counted!” I can understand these readers’ annoyance but I do think the overuse of “like” generally disappears as teenagers become adults.

My thanks to you all. So I mean, if less people would have written in, it would have begged the surreal question of, like, growing the column.