Lately as I listen to the daily babble I am put in mind of the Fats Waller song “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Well, it seems that now we’re getting around way too much. “Around,” which started life as a perfectly respectable preposition and then for some reason known only to “educators” and social workers began to engulf and devour “about,” now threatens to obliterate an entire lexical population. In just the past few days, I have heard or had reported to me the following.
“Dave’s point seems to be around governance.”
“There was an analysis done around this.”
“Bali will customize an exercise plan around your goals.”
As they say in the military, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Okay, let’s take them one at a time:
1. Around governance. This is the classic case, a substitution of around for about. The dictionary does say that among its many meanings, “around” can be equated to “about.” So you could just chalk this up to linguistic drift, the tendency of idioms to shift slightly over time. Even if you find the substitution ugly to the ear, as I do, you might just have to, well, work around it.
2. Analysis done around this. No, no, no! It’s one thing to substitute one word for another while preserving the meaning. It’s quite another to use that same word to fog up the windshield. Exactly how do you do an analysis “around” something? Do you put the thing in the center of the room and then have a group of analysts do the hora? I have but one little word for you my friends, “Of.”
3. Plan around your goals. This is my favorite. Don’t plan to reach your goals, plan around them! Then you’ll never have to reach them, and as we (including Bali Total Fitness?) know, when it comes to exercise, most of us never do.
To continue that thought, are we just talking laziness here? Does it take too much energy to come up with prepositional phrases that actually describe what you’re talking about? Or is it a contagion? I don’t know. I’ll have to think around it.
4 comments:
To play devil's advocate here, isn't it possible that "around" in this context introduces some nuance that's not conveyed, or at least not conveyed as efficiently, by other prepositions? That it connotes something approximate rather than exact? I feel there's a difference in meaning between an analysis "of" something and an analysis "around" something -- analyzing "around" something might mean keeping a particular point in mind while doing an analysis OF some other thing. And it's certainly faster than saying "we did an analysis of X while keeping in mind the Y factor." Similarly, in the fitness center example, the fitness center is keeping YOUR goals in mind while designing an exercise plan for YOU (YOU can plan to reach your goals, but the fitness center can't actually plan to reach them FOR you). Of course, they could say "based on" your goals, but that's two words instead of one. Just my two cents -- my perspective is probably infected by that linguistics course I took!
As a result of my last comment, I've had my sanity questioned by Ms. Literate. Undaunted, I now return to invite further comments on a new usage: to "grow" things, not in the sense of growing crops, but in the sense of making something larger (e.g., "grow the organization"). I believe Bill Clinton gets the credit, or blame, for this usage -- he kept talking about "growing" the economy during one of his presidential campaigns. I find this "grow" locution annoying, but I suspect it's just because it's new. I don't see that it really impoverishes the English language. Sure, you could just use "expand," but I think people use "grow" because it has a stronger, more vigorous feel to it. Once again, just my two cents -- for which I will probably get bashed!
This Wexler woman has gone around the bend.
Quite right. And how about covering the constant use of past tense when we mean present tense, ie: "I was just calling to see about such and such..." I find myself writing these things sometimes and then asking if I really mean WAS? Usually not, and I correct it! Confusion in tense is all over the place. Not to mention confusion of tents.
I wonder what the cause of this...was...is. Some kind of lazy vernacular phrasing that became common. Think around on it for a while...
-- E
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