Malicious and inappropriate is the patentably Indian abuse of
would in places where
will was the only choice (and hence, there was no choice at all, really). If someone can tell me how and why this abusage was born, I would (right usage!) be much obliged. Here's
a page that opens with a storm of examples. Replace every
would you see with a
will and you will (not would!) see the correct form of the paragraph.
Next up is a common nugget that enjoyed a short life when we were all in school, because the English teacher was constantly telling you about positive, comparative and superlative forms of adjectives (If your English teacher did not do this, please stop reading at this point and find something else to do, preferably something that does not involve reading or writing). I like to call this the reinforced comparative. You can't blame the users (or abusers, if you will) for trying to take a simple rule for creating comparative forms and choosing to ignore the other rules (after all, it seems inconsistent to have more than one way to do the same thing ... unless you're writing Perl). These hapless souls decide to use more as the prefix for comparative forms. This in itself would not have been so bad if we had people saying "this is more good than that" or "things are more clear now"; a little advice can usually help in such matters. What seems incurable is the replacement of the positive form with the correct comparative form after having exercised the simple rule. This unfortunately gives us egregious exhibits like "this is more better than that" or "things are more clearer now." Want an example? Try Sukanya Verma's notes on a slide in an old Rediff special (ironically about English in Bollywood).
We return to the land of mustard fields, IT stables and cinemalls for our next exhibit, another example of achieving symmetry in conjugation for database actions. If the noun for the verb select is selection, for delete deletion and for insert insertion, shouldn't it be updation for update? Given the host of inconsistencies of the English language, this is the kind of intelligence one might expect in a discarded prototype of an android learning English; this is the kind of linguistic competence people seem to (often incorrectly) assume that they possess. The lessons in English and English grammar in school do not, unfortunately, include a special session to warn the students that all languages evolve and there's enough going on already without them contributing something like this to the melting pot. It's interesting to see that people seem to forget the basic rules of grammar (which, all deities of sanity be praised, have survived the vagaries of time) and indulge, instead, in neological pursuits.
We end this rant into the darkness of despair with another example of the dreaded on a/an X basis. Our sample comes from a warning note on a prominent money transfer portal about currency exchange rates. The authors of the paragraph warn you that the rates change on a dynamic basis. It's nice to know that the rates are not the only vulnerable things around -- the foundation they stand on is also equally shaky. Unless they meant to use dynamic like corporate crapspeakers do, suggesting some sort of executive vitality that is lost on everyone else.
