About 15 or 16 years ago, I attended a concert by a wonderful choral group from a moderately large high school, directed by a former classmate of mine. It was my first exposure to the group, and I was amused to see they called themselves, “A Capella” for two reasons:
While the director obviously meant the term to mean “unaccompanied voices” (yes, I checked and that was what had originally been intended, and, indeed, the group had been a voices only group for its first few years), most of their performance was of music accompanied by their director or a student playing piano. And…
“Capella” refers to either a female goat or a first-magnitude star in the constellation Auriga, NOT a cappella (“in the manner of the Roman chapel”) singing. The second “p” really does make a difference for anyone who’s literate.
But nowadays, meaning takes the back seat in nearly every interaction, while feeling has attained ascendancy in all, it seems. Distinctions in meaning are dismissed as “just semantics” or “silly syntax/grammar/orthography rules” (assuming “syntax” and “orthography” are in the vocabulary of the illiterate boob objecting to clear communication).
But back to my lil vignette. I approached my former classmate after the concert and offered my sincere congratulations on having built so fine a musical performance group in a public school system. I also noted the interesting name. Appalled director much? *heh* Name was changed to protect the innocent singers.
I hate the way that “they” sometimes deliberately misspell the names of groups or things so that they can make a “trademark”. Eventually people start thinking that the correct way to spell the words they are looking for is the way products are named.
Well, the director changed the name to the proper spelling when I made the revelation. It was a simple spelling error on the directors part… that had stood for a decade w/o anyone either a. knowing it was a spelling error or b. caring enough about what the group was saying about itself by naming itself either a female goat or a well-known astronomical feature.
But yeh, deliberate misspelling of words to create a trademark name is asinine.
I hate when people decide they can disregard rules of language for their convenience. (Not your director friend, but those *other* people…)
Well, Nicole, we’re reaping the whirlwind of 50 years of deconstructivism, post (and post-post) modernism and all that jazz, combined with deliberate (yes, I simply cannot believe it’s not intentional) dumbing down of the “common man” to the point where at least, bare minimum, 90% of folks don’t even have any understanding of how meaning differs between tenses and moods, at the very least, let alone how “niggardly” (to take one egregious example of stupidity winning out over common sense) has absolutely NO relationship to the much-dreaded “N” word that is a racist epithet in the mouths of white folks while being hunky-dory common speech in the mouths of many black folks.
Relativism is a one-way street, you see.
But since examples of stupidity in English usage abound–especially, it seems, from the mouths of Mass MEdia Podpeople who make their living with words!–and one could swamp this blog with examples, I think I’ll just cut my mini-rant off here…
English is the most remarkable language on the planet. It’s robust, expressive, flexible and will drag other languages off in a dark alley to mug ’em for useful adjectives, nouns and expressions, emerging with its stolen lucre more expressive and robust than before. But it isn’t, I fear, up to this deliberate and unremitting assault upon reason itself. *sigh*