If you’ve spent enough time with me on this blog, you’ll know that my writing is full of misspellings, typos, grammatical mistakes… all sprinkled amongst even worse offenses. I correct them when I find them but I’ve written so much at this point, much of it is doomed to stay marred by my missteps as a testament to my literary frailties for the ages.
In some cases, a spell-checker or AI-based grammatical tool can help me correct those minor mistakes that my reviewing eyes pass over. Recent advances in technology means that I can quickly spot things that have long hung about in my writing; flaws that slipped past the 20-teens spell-checking technology. In a subset of those cases, I’ll choose to leave my awkward language intact – both as a record of what I actually wrote, once upon a time, and because with my odd choice of phrasing, I may have actually conveyed some meaning. Or at least I meant to do so.
I was recently cleaning up a post and found a phrase that needed to be corrected.
Instead of “brick-and-mortar” I had typed “brick-and-mortal.” The original phrase, intended to contrast the traditional storefront with an internet-enhanced, online presence, has probably mostly fallen out of use. ‘Net commerce has become so ubiquitous and mainstream that an either/or comparison with the pre-internet era rarely makes sense. In today’s environment, where the most feared threat is the very1 AI that found my mistake, my typo-coined phrase may make even more sense than the original.
Not enough sense, of course, that I felt I could leave it intact. It looks stupidly wrong when your eyes pick it up and seemingly requires several paragraphs of discussion to make it sound clever. If it does take off, though, I’d like to claim here and now that I came up with it on my own.
While I’m claiming credit for common phrases, let me restate one claim I’ve long, if not necessarily widely, staked out for myself. I was sure I’d mentioned it already somewhere in this blog, but I can’t find it.
When I was in college, it seriously started to bother me that we Gen X’ers were uttering phrases like “cool, man” as if we were some kind of grass-addled hippies. I decided right then and there that I would cease using the phrase (and its various permutations). To do so, I realized2, required coming up with a substitute. My substitute was “excellent.”
Per my usage, excellent was stated sharply and with an exclamation point. “Excellent!” Imagine it being elocuted by an Imperial British Army officer, and you’ll get a sense of what I was going for. I was fairly successful in making the substitution, at least as far as I judged it. I’d say my friends tended to ignore me and others probably didn’t have cause to listen to me much. I do recall a couple of sorority girls mimicking my phrase back to me, with a chuckle. I assumed then, and still do now, that they were making fun of my odd nature rather than admiring my more civilized employment of language. To one gal, as I recall, I explained the whole story (much as I have here) and she did seem to appreciate my intentions and goal. I am also quite sure she still found me odd.
Thus the world was a couple of years later, shortly after I found myself living on the Left Coast. The interjection “excellent” seemed to have made it into the “surfer dude” lingo and was, in 1989, popularized by Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Of course, the dynamic duo articulated it quite a bit differently than the way I had used it myself. For that reason (among a multitude of others) it would be extremely unlikely, but not entirely impossible, that my own version spread rapidly through the colleges of the Northeast before working its way out to the beaches of California. That mere sliver of a possibility allows me to, occasionally, claim that I coined the phrase.
On a somewhat-related note, you must have noticed that I’ve dipped my toe into the fetid swamp that is AI-generated imagery. I didn’t want to do it but, sometimes, the artists of this world just don’t take the photographs that I need them to take. I’ll try not to overuse it but, as you’ve probably learned by now, I am not a man of strong will.
- Not literally, of course. It turns out that AI-enhanced spelling and grammar checkers are far more effective at finding the kind of mistakes that I tend to make than the traditional spell check function. Indeed, Google’s version sometimes amazes me in its ability to, seemingly, comprehend my intent and how the words I’ve used (which may be spelled correctly) derail it. However, I am not trying to imply that this same spell checker is running an eCommerce website. ↩︎
- It is quite possible that I’d encountered, in a psychology class or perhaps in “Language Arts”, a discussion about “filler words.” It was suggested that it would be easier to substitute other, shall we say, mental ticks for the “ums,” “ahs”, and “likes” than to simply purge ourselves of the bad habit. ↩︎
et tu, Bluto? 