Suffering through the Morning Paper

If you are interested in a really good article about responding better to those patients in the hospital who need help, read this article from today’s New York Times. If you would rather hear me kvetch about current language use, keep on reading because that’s what my fingers want me to talk about today.

Here’s the first one.

Whether it’s a request for ice water, help getting to the bathroom or a plea for pain relief, an unanswered call light leaves hospital patients feeling helpless and frustrated. And for nurses, often the first responders to these calls, the situation is frustrating too: Short staffing and a heavy workload often make it impossible to respond as quickly as they would like.

“…as quickly as they would like.” Is that really worth anything at all? The Mavericks are going to play the Heat tonight. Will anyone at all on the losing team say that they didn’t score “as many points as they would like?” Is the gap between what you would have liked to do and what you did really the most useful comparison? Hardly ever.

In politics, it’s mostly a gesture intended to avoid responsibility. The whip promises the Speaker that the bill will pass, but it fails. The whip tells the press the bill didn’t receive “as many votes as we would like.” Right. It also didn’t receive as many votes as you promised; as many votes as you calculated; as many votes as the people who rely on your competence and good judgment had every right to expect.” And all those bases of comparison are more useful than the one you used. Hm.

The “as much as I would have liked” gambit turns every failure into a comparison between what happened and what your preferences were. There are, as I illustrated above, other alternatives and nearly all those alternatives are more useful in finding the glitch or allocating the blame or placing the event within some shared body of expectation.

I’m really tired of “as much as they would like.” You could tell that, right?

Next up, the use of “around” as a preposition of interaction. Here’s one.

“We’ve really fundamentally changed the way we interact with our patients around their needs,” said Lauren Cates, the hospitals’ chief operating officer.

We’ve gone to “around” in many cases where one used to say “on.” I have seen people write that an argument is “based around” a theoretical premise common in the field. Why on earth would you base it around the premise when, with any diligence at all, you could base it “on" it. Is there any particular merit in placing the first floor of a house “around the foundation” you poured for it? Would “on the foundation” really be any worse? It would likely be better if you were thinking about earthquake insurance. Also, routinely making a first floor larger than the foundation will be routinely more expensive. More expansive also.

Is it just my imagination, or do “as much as I would like” and “based around” slide away from common usage in the same direction? For the same reason? Are they unrelated? Is there a conspiracy?

I probably wouldn’t have noticed this next one with anything more than a passing irritation, but I has just been treated to “rounding” as a word referring to regularly checking on patients to see if they are OK. But I was still puzzling over that—I think I was wondering whether, if they start on the first floor, they call it “rounding up” and if they start on the top floor, “rounding down”—when I got this.

Dr. William Southern, chief of hospital medicine at Montefiore, says, “Call bells are something that me and my entire staff think it’s important to answer.”

I think that is an admirable sentiment. I like Dr. Southern’s attitude. His grammar, not so much. Are call bells really something me think it is important to answer?” And not only do me think it, my staff thinks it, too. Me do and them do.

And finally, although it might be final only because it is in the last paragraph of the story, we get this: “Bottom line, never leave anyone in the hospital overnight by themselves immediately after a procedure or birth, even if they tell you it’s O.K.”

It is by now an old complaint that “they” has become the proper pronoun for “anyone.” In this sentence, it is just sloppy but there are times when you really need to know what a plural pronoun refers to. That’s why the agreement in number—singulars go with singulars; plurals with plurals—has always been a part of the foundation of grammar. Being a part of the foundation, of course, means that many uses are “based around it.”

If you are not prepared to say “he”—the old neuter form of the pronoun—or “he or she,” which is a lot of trouble, you might want to consider using a plural noun. You might say “Never leave people in the hospital…” There are a lot of alternative phrasings—as I recall, I was once baited into handing out a paper listing eight of them—that keep singulars with singulars and plurals with plurals. It’s just something you need to think is worth doing. I suppose someone needs to think it is worth teaching.

None of these complaints, by the way, should be lodged with Tara Parker-Pope, who wrote this piece for the New York Times and who writes so well that I routinely read whatever topic she is writing on. Um…”on which she is writing on.”