Creating problems
How many things can we be peeved about?
Just when I think I've heard every peeve ever petted, every gripe ever griped, someone comes along with a brand new example of sin and error in the use of English. Last week's revelation, spotted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Word Watch column, was that we've all been disrespecting the verb create.
"Every day we hear about people creating wealth, creating jobs, creating opportunity and creating new programs," wrote Jim Shearer. Wrong, he said: "I learned many years ago from Sister Suzanne, when I was in the fifth grade that only the Lord creates. {hellip} Human beings produce, develop, implement and build. We don't create!"
Now, there is a special sense of create that applies mainly to God's work, in religions (or varieties thereof) that believe in creation ex nihilo, or "out of nothing." Sister Suzanne may well have told her charges that only her God could perform such a feat. But did she really think other uses of the verb were improper, or even impious?
They aren't, of course. Create is derived from the Latin creare, a verb used by the polytheistic citizens of pre-Christian Rome. It didn't become an English word till the late 14th century, and it was not restricted to a religious sense: Among the early examples in the Oxford English Dictionary, two are from Chaucer, who refers to God creating "al thing," but also to statues as "creat[ed] {hellip} eternally to dure."
And Chaucer's contemporaries, the translators of the Wycliffe Bible, chose to render God's act of creation into English with the good old English "make." "In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe," says the 1395 version (making the ex nihilo point explicit). "In the beginning, God made of nothing heaven and earth."
So yes (if you doubted it), create is approved for use by the pious and the godless alike. I was less interested in the specific rule, however, than in its novelty; it must have been created ex nihilo, as it were, by Sister Suzanne or one of her teachers. And yet, suddenly, here it is among us, trying to propagate itself, and maybe succeeding with a reader or two.
Where might this process lead us? Well, if you're one of those readers who agree with the restriction on create, and you came to this discussion with a list of 100 usage "don't's," you now have 101. If you accept the advice of the other Word Watchers in that column - don't say "have a look" or "have a listen," don't swallow the l in vulnerable, don't say "it is what it is" - you're up to 105.
A trivial issue for you, maybe, but it's a profound one for official peevology. Joseph Williams, author of the writing handbook "Style: Toward Grace and Clarity," laid out the doomsday scenario in a 1981 essay, where he noted that anytime we're invited to rule on a given usage, we're likely to answer conservatively. Whether you ask your mother or the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, the answer will be "do as I think I should say, not as I do." (You can link to the essay at Language Log, where Mark Liberman discussed it in a January post.)
"The problem is self-evident," said Williams. "Since we can ask an indefinite number of questions about an indefinite number of items of usage, we can, merely by asking, accumulate an indefinite number of errors, simply because whoever we ask will feel compelled to answer {hellip} we will invariably end up with more errors than we began with." (And our list will include many usages that we don't truly experience as errors, whatever our superegos say we should think.)
Copy editors live with this phenomenon; you teach your little obscure rules to your coworker, she teaches hers to you, and you both have enlarged your peeve collections. Every usage book has a slightly different selection of cautions; total them up, and you could have thousands of items to nitpick.
In civilian life, though, our hoards of peeves tend to be limited by our attention spans. Most of us have a core set of usage habits - ones we either grew up with or learned fairly young - that are deeply embedded. To me, "If he'd moved faster, he may have escaped" is as weird as "See Spot ran." On the other hand, I would have to squint hard to spot a misuse of continuous for continual.
The problem for individual peevesters, in fact, is not that our lists are ever-lengthening, but that we don't notice that our complaints are not widely shared, or are obsolete, or, like the unholy create, were never valid in the first place. Most people would rather stick with their favorites, literally or go missing or even dear old hopefully. There's a reason we call them "pet" peeves.
E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas; visit the Word blog at boston.com/ideas/theword. 