James Cochrane is a really angry person. See, the world is full of these people that take his language and do things with it that he doesn’t like. This riled him so much that he went out and wrote a book (Between You and I, 2003) listing all the ways common mushmouths hurt his language, in alphabetical order, and then pointing out how you are an imbecile if you do these things. I’ve only been able to put up with so much of him excoriating me for saying things like “It feels like I’m falling in love”, so, in fairness, it’s possible he lightens up after the Cs. But here’s a quick rundown of some of his feelings about users of English, from the A through C sections:
“To say something like ‘as far as United’s chances’ … is lazy and uneducated.” (17)
“It is hard to find a reason for its not being used … other than sheer stupidity.” (21)
“It is not at all good English to be bored of something.” (22)
“Educated readers will not need to be told that could of represents an illiterate mishearing…” (31)
Sadly, Cochrane’s book does not address the distressing tendency among pigheaded authors to misuse the word educated. (I skipped ahead to the E section just to make sure.) Educated, as defined by the OED, means “That has received education, mental or physical; instructed, trained, etc.”. The meaning intended by Cochrane in his quote about could of is in fact that of the word well-educated or perhaps the phrase properly educated; he is attempting to distinguish between those (like him) who learned how to be a pedant and those (like the rest of us) who learned how not to be a jerk.
The more I think about this, the angrier I get. I am aware that using educated to mean well-educated is well-established by common usage by the hoity-toity set. But these same people are the ones who rail against how common usage is making as and like interchangeable, or about how common usage permits disinterested both as indifferent and impartial. The difference is that it’s poor, under-educated people who make the latter mistakes. But, Mr. Cochrane, I submit to you that you are no better than the masses whose educations you derisively dismiss as inconsequential. And I just want to suggest that, in your own words, “It is hard to find a reason for [well-educated] not being used … other than sheer stupidity.”
Cochrane has some other overly harsh opinions that I hope to comment upon in the near future. However, I just can’t take his martyrdom seriously right now, and I feel this way about all the others who anoint themselves educated and anoint the rest of us fools. It is a very fine line between language change and language crime, and unfortunately, some ill-informed judges hold the court.
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August 27, 2007 at 8:21 am
goofy
Well said. But actually, “disinterested” has been used to mean “uninterested” and “impartial” thruout its history by many educated writers.
August 27, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Gabe
I wholeheartedly agree — this supposed error is pretty much sociologically opaque & historically common. But to hear prescriptivists tell it, only ill-educated troglodytes use “disinterested” to mean “uninterested”. Much like the common point made on Language Log that writers who argue one should never use the passive voice extensively use the passive voice themselves.
August 30, 2007 at 6:07 am
renaissanceguy
I’m afraid I have to support Cochrane’s use of “educated” here. It could be taken as meaning “having actually received an education” as opposed to simply “having attended school.” It could also be taken literally. He might actually believe that everybody who has received an education already knows this point of grammar.
If you want to criticize his use of “educated” you could call it a tautology. He has arbitrarily defined “educated” as somebody who doesn’t write “could of”; therefore, everyone who abstains from it is “educated.”
September 2, 2007 at 11:30 am
Gabe
But here’s the problem – there are many people who have received an education that will still make this mistake. Not people who merely attended school, but people who attended school, tried hard, and learned more than I (or, I imagine, even Cochrane) did. I’m thinking of engineers, doctors, mathematicians, and all sorts of non-humanities people. To consider them illiterate or uneducated is, to my mind, a bit of a stretch of the meanings of these two words.
My objection is in some sense disingenuous – I believe that you should be able to stretch meanings of words so that “educated” can mean either “attended school” or “learned stuff at school”. However, given Cochrane’s recalcitrance on stretching the meanings of words in other cases (e.g., his insistence that “alibi” refers only to a type of plea, not generally to an excuse) suggests he should not be so cavalier in stretching the meaning of educated and illiterate.
My real objection is to the wide-spread nature of this meaning stretch, which betrays a certain arrogance on the part of its users. Educated is used tautologically to dismiss other people’s educations because they don’t meet the speaker’s arbitrary criteria, irrespective of the actual amount of education those people have received.
September 10, 2007 at 6:58 pm
languagelover
I once worked with an English teacher who had not only been “educated” at a college and received a degree, but was “highly qualified.” However, she continued to misuse the verb “seen” whenever she spoke. “I seen it over there.” Somehow, she had the audacity to teach grammar despite being unable to overcome the local vernacular she had grown up with. “Educated” is a pretty loosely defined term that Cochrane might need to define in his next book “Confessions of an educated prig.”