LANGUAGE CORNER
by Evan Jenkins

Gild/Paint the Lily
Brush Up Your Shakespeare, Act II
Like "honored in the breach," the original phrase whence cometh this common error is usable just the way himself wrote it: "If you want to gild the lily, you could add herbs or minced garlic to the cheese layer" (emphasis added; the phrase in italics is the problem). In King John, some of the nobles are discussing His Majesty's plans to have himself crowned a second time. To do so, says one, would be "wasteful and ridiculous excess," as it would be "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily..." So our example is off on two counts: It seems to mean adding a finishing touch or a flourish, but Shakespeare meant going overboard. And it abuses the original, lovely phrasing. Let's face it, the guy had a touch.

Graffito/Graffiti
It Takes Two
Or more. This was fun, but it wasn't quite right: "Graffiti is illegal -- but it's a beautiful crime." When only one piece of amateur artwork adorns an otherwise bare wall, there's a nice, useful word for it: "graffito." The word in our example -- used as a singular, as it so commonly is -- is the plural.

addendum, 2/18/99

Some challenging e-mail about that item came from Dennis Moran, assistant business editor of the Prague Post. "English borrows copiously if incompletely," he wrote, noting such Associated Press style preferences as "referendums" and "stadiums" (not the Latin plurals "referenda" and "stadia"). Amen to those, and to "curriculums," rather than the pompous "curricula" still widely favored in academic circles.

"In the court of common usage," Mr. Moran went on, "it seems to me that 'graffiti' won out long ago as both singular and plural. Actually, it seems to me that in English it's an uncountable noun, like 'grass.' The word refers to the phenomenon, and doesn't count scrawlings."

Outside of archeological and other scholarly writing, where the singular was uniformly distinguished from the plural, the word is a relatively recent arrival in English, dating only from the 1960's. And while the plural (with or without a plural verb) is more common -- as are the multiple scrawlings it defines -- the singular, when appropriate, still has defenders among writers and experts on usage. And, when appropriate, it's a nicety worth preserving. Also a sweet kind of word, as Mr. Moran suggested in a subsequent note.

"Actually, I'd love it if people used the word 'graffito,' " he wrote, "I guess because I Iove Italian words ... But I never hear it, so it seems to me doomed." It isn't if writers and editors decide it isn't; we can still use it when one bit of writing is all we're talking about. And it would be a shame if we could no longer say, should the occasion arise, "A lone grafitto graced the chapel wall."

 

 

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