Word Crimes (Weird Al)

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 6:53 PM, Brian Hitchcock <brianhi at skechers.com> wrote:
>
> Well, the pot calls the kettle black; mote in the other guy's eye, beam in
> your own; etc.:
>
> The headline of the first of the two articles cited ( http://goo.gl/HRauu2 )
> calls Mr. Yankovic's infelicity a "gaff"  (!)
> Therein, I posit, lies the greater gaffe. Not a grammar or syntax error, but
> questionable usage.
>
> But then, the Mail Online is (are?) Australian; maybe it's perfectly OK to
> confuse the two homophones there. (I can't tell whether it was the Australian
> Associated Press or the Mail Online who composed the headline.)  There
> seem to be instances of both spellings for the same meaning in various
> Australian sites. "The Australian" seems to hedge its bet, recognizing both
> spellings in the title of its page "Microphone Gaffs | Microphone Gaffes",
> though the heading text says "Microphone gaffes".
>
> I certainly would not go so far as to use a gaff on Mr. Yankovic, merely
> because he split an infinitive.

Leaving aside the spelling of "gaff(e)," Weird Al addressed this in an
interview on the Grammarly blog:

http://www.grammarly.com/blog/2014/exclusive-interview-weird-al/
"I purposely left a split infinitive at the end of my song ... to be
ironic, and also to see how many online grammar pedants it would
annoy."

For more on this, as well as objections over Weird Al's use of the
word "spastic," see my latest Language Log post:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13552

--bgz

-- 
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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