Parts of Speech: 2. May I Interject?

 

Ms. Picky is in the Tropics. In the early morning, she sat with her laptop, under a pink umbrella, overlooking a lagoon. A dragonfly was just lighting on a slow-moving green island of accumulated moss and grasses, and, on the far side of the lagoon, a Great White Heron was performing his morning ablutions. He took a beakful of water,  tilted his head back and allowed the water to cascade down over himself, then shook himself dry. . . . The day certainly began peacefully enough.

Ms. Picky had an idea that she would like to write something about interjections. To prime the pump, she Googled “interjections,” and came up with a Wikipedia list of what the linguist-writer was calling “sentence connectors” (which, she noted with some distaste, were by no means conjunctions).

That’s how the trouble began. The writer went on to say that interjections should be considered part of a larger group of words known as “particles.” Dear Wikipedia Author: They should not be so considered—not for a moment—at least not in a discussion of English grammar. 

Linguists and grammarians, it seems, have long been at war with each other over their separate approaches to language: Linguists believe, with Alexander Pope, that “whatever is, is right,” while grammarians take more of a Robert Browning approach: “man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Linguists’ approach is to observe language as an amorphous, ever-evolving phenomenon, a phenomenon that evolves at different rates, in different ways, in different regions, among different groups of people. That approach is quite reasonable, if the linguists stay on their own side of the court.

But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, in fact, they believe that one should not even correct one’s children’s grammar, because, as a professor once told Ms. Picky, children’s language should be allowed to have the freedom to be “whatever it will be.”

The problem is that “whatever it will be” will be one thing to a group of New York bankers, another thing to a group of Boston academics, and something else altogether to Washington politicians, and, pretty soon, we effectively have a Tower of Babel, with speakers saying one thing, and listeners understanding another (which, indeed, has happened quite frequently since the current financial crisis began).

While there will always be neologisms related to specific trades and professions—from ice fishing to accounting—or to conditions, like regional topography, or weather, or climate, that are specific to a particular group or region—we need to be careful that such neologisms are kept en famille, so to speak, used only within that group or region—unless they are used in quotes and defined, which treatment allows a common understanding of their meaning.

So now we will go back to where we began: to interjections, which are simply “excited utterances” or exclamations, are not gramattically part of any sentence, and are usually used with an exclamation point:

Examples of Interjections

Current:

Cheers!

Wow!

Damn!

Indeed!

Whew!

Historical/Archaic:

Hail!

Alas!

Lo!

Farewell!

Oh and the Vocative O

One more thing on the subject: The distinction between “oh” and “O.” First of all, it is most likely that the modern “oh” derived from the older, vocative “O,” which was, in Latin, an indication of direct address, sometimes used to summon divine help (“O God!,” “O holy martyr!,” “O great and holy one!”) and sometimes used to invoke a muse (“O Beauty!,” “O Truth!”).

“Oh,” on the other hand, is a modern, jack-of-all-trades interjection that is used, variously, to introduce a change in subject (“Oh, I’m tired of this subject!”) or a different opinion (Oh, I have to disagree!”), or to allow the speaker to organize his thoughts while not yielding the floor by ceasing to speak altogether.

There are a couple of differences in the way “oh” and “O” are treated: The vocative “O” is always capitalized and never followed by a comma, while “oh” is capped, or not, according to its place in the sentence, and, if it appears within a sentence, is followed by a comma.

A linguist might go on at greater length about interjections, but Ms. Picky, as a grammarian, would like to interject . . . and  exclaim pointedly that, from a grammatical point of view, there’s no more to say about them!!!

_____

Journalism Wall of Shame

The Journalism Wall of Shame displays errors in grammar, punctuation, or language that have appeared recently in the press. Submissions are welcome. Please include the publication's name and date, the story title, and the reporter's name. The publication of these errors in no way places blame for them on a particular person. Sometimes it is the reporter, sometimes the editor, sometimes the headline writer, but—somewhere in the system—somebody should have known better.

“The company could still profit off of increasing healthcare costs due to the spread of obesity though.”

—“3 Dividend Paying Pharma Stocks That Will Profit Off of Rising Obesity Rate,” “Power Hedge Contributor,” Seeking Alpha, July 17, 2011

It is unfortunate this illiterate usage of “off of” has begun to appear quite frequently in the press.  It is even more unfortunate that a headline should repeat and highlight it, and, even then, that nobody should pick it up. It should of course be:

The company could still profit from increasing healthcare costs due to the spread of obesity. . . .


(And we won’t even mention the unfortunate verbal picture created by the unfortunate use of “spread” in such close proximity to the word “obesity.”)

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