• Words. Supposedly these set us apart from animals. I have my doubts.
  
• Annoyances great and small. Mostly small.
  

   I have never (yet) travelled to France. The prospect intimidates me. Two years of high school French, plus a lick-and-a-promise French for Reading Knowledge in graduate school, have not adequately prepared me to do much more than order a croissant in a café while scanning Le Monde's headlines. Supposedly, no sooner do you open your mouth to say something - in what seems sufficiently French to you - than a self-appointed Gallic language crusader jumps down your throat and rips you a new one. Your pronunciation, your vocabulary, your intonation, even your facial expressions are all, I'm told, going to be critiqued if you fall short of a near-native grasp of the language and its intricacies. (Not being a near-native, I would certainly fall short.) The story goes that French citizens in good moods will conduct impromptu-but-rigorous language lessons in an attempt to help you straighten up and speak properly. French persons in foul moods, on the other hand, will (reputedly) vilify you for your barbaric mangling of the mother tongue. Whether you're trying to catch a train, or buy condoms, or express an opinion, what you're actually saying will matter far less than how you're saying it. Is this true?

   But wait, there's more. So far as I know, France is the only nation with a formal scholarly organization (L'Académie Française) whose mission includes protecting their native language from neologisms and loanwords imported from other tongues, especially American English. (Makes me wonder whether French pen pals return missives to other nations marked up in red ink.) Shoot, in early March of 2000, the French Ministry of Finance upheld the proud tradition by banning Anglicisms like 'e-mail' and 'startup.' Instead, Monsieur Bureaucrat is supposed to write 'courrier electronique' and 'jeune pousse.' This is true.

   (Update from the Associated Press, July 18 2003: it seems France's Culture Ministry has declared that 'courriel,' a contraction of 'courrier electronique,' shall henceforth be the term of choice to describe electronic correspondence, 'e-mail' being an American neologism and therefore suspect. So is there an official in Paris whose title is 'Minister of Culture'? Can this person's secretary answer the phone and say, with a straight face, "Good morning, Culture Minister's office"? Just wondering...)

   (Update from Jeffrey Kacirk's 'Forgotten English' calendar, September 5 2005: today's calendar page notes that "On this date in 1789, future American President John Adams proposed that the Second Continental Congress create an academy whose purpose would be the 'fixing and improvement' of American English." I infer that the idea came to nothing.)

   I can hear the righteous indignation starting to boil over about now: "You ugly American!" "How dare you insult the French by making these inflammatory remarks?" "Who are you to criticize the great nation of France and its proud linguistic traditions?"

   Insult? Criticize? I ADMIRE French protectionist attitudes toward their spoken and written language! Maybe they go a bit too far with this Culture Ministry schtick, but at least they care about their language, and that's commendable. I wish more Americans cared enough to correct stupid, ignorant misuses of English wherever and whenever they're encountered. Sadly, our problem isn't among foreign travellers, whose English is (in my experience) typically better than ours; it's among us. Our friends. Our families. Our co-workers. Even (*gasp*) ourselves.

   Hardly a day goes by without my spotting some foolish mistake, or hearing someone misuse a common English expression. Trouble is, giving a damn about spoken and written English is about as socially acceptable as collecting toenail clippings. The minute you speak up, however gently, to correct someone's mistaken usage, you instantly become One Of Those Anal Types Who Get All Bent Out Of Shape About Irrelevancies. You may possibly get popped upside the head. More likely, you'll get a patronizing look and some comment about how you must have made your grammar teachers very proud, dear. (In point of fact, my grammar teachers despaired of me: I could say 'this is wrong,' and correct it, but to this day I can't tell you why. But I digress.)

   What follow are errors or misunderstood constructions. When they come out of your mouth or emerge from your printer, they make you look like an idiot and they diminish you in my estimation. I regret there's absolutely nothing I can do about these errors except point them out and try to teach my own children to avoid them.

   Unless, of course, you want to sound like an idiot.

'FLAUNT' and 'FLOUT.'
To flaunt something is to show it off, to display it openly, to call others' attention to it. To flout is to knowingly and deliberately ignore a convention or break a rule. The next time you go to a mall, watch how thirteen-year-old girls move when they're walking in groups and think boys are watching them. That's flaunting. Now listen closely after a harried mom who's chaperoning them says "Don't pop your gum, it's unsightly." You'll think someone lit a string of firecrackers. That's flouting.
   (I know you never go to malls. Nor do you ever watch television. Neither do I. So when you and I find ourselves standing beside one another in a mall, staring at a display window filled with TVs all showing a rerun of "Charmed," let's just pretend we've never met, OK?)

By this time you may wonder if I have even a shred of a sense of humor left. Thankfully, yes, I do. Every now and again I'll see a spam message with a subject line that grabs my attention and makes me laugh. When I do, I'll post it here (as a single item, not a list). Most recent howler:

Please revcvert!.