One day, while sitting at the counter of my favorite cidery, dithering away the day, I heard, not for the first time, a customer’s response to a server’s inquiry about what items they wanted from the menu: “I’m gonna do …” the customer began, and I ground my back teeth to powder, and grumbled inside. When did “do” replace “have?”
My dictionary dive found that the verb “do,” with an object, can be used as “perform (an action)” or “work on something;” also, to “make or have available and provide,” such as a single room at a hotel or a favor. The verb can be applied to cooking, producing, or giving a performance at a play. But none of my research indicated that it was proper to use the verb “do” as a substitute for “sample,” or for “have.” The randy young men of the world — at least, in this part of the world — have a way of expressing intentions toward females of the species that include the verb “do,” but the dictionary notes that when used in that way, “do” is classified as “vulgar slang.”
You may sigh, and slap your foreheads, thinking that I make too much of too little, and that I may need a hobby, or another hobby. As the poet William Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us; late and soon…” His famous sonnet chides us for drifting away from nature and by “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…” That may seem to be contradicted by some of our country’s recent activities, but still: I need a hobby that will keep me from obsessing about the use of language.
I have written before about my adoration of a writer for the New York Times who I later discovered to be an avowed segregationist, and who believed that all who shared the African ancestry that I have, to be unworthy of inclusion at the tables of life. I had been reading his column for years before I learned of his contempt for me, but I still remember the lessons that he taught me about writing, and language. He would never “do” a chicken salad, or “do” a mango cider.
I had a logomachy with a reader about the word “eldest;” the reader sent me an e-mail questioning my usage. Despite my citations from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, the reader contended that I was both “grammatically and linguistically incorrect.” The reader indicated that his wife, a retired mathematics professor, agreed with him. I did not caution him against bringing a mathematician to a word fight, but I smiled to myself and thought of it as we continued our logomachy (an argument about words).
I recognize that language evolves and hope I can evolve with it. But while being pushed into the next phase of language usage, I will drag my feet in revolt against the way some words are used. My language usage is consistent; I speak in the same way in the pool hall as I do in the lecture hall. I take some heat from the pool hall junkies, but I refuse to “speak down” to anyone. When my youngest granddaughter asks me why I say, “move my bowels,” I explain to the 7-year-old girl that the term is correct for the action being performed. And it is a matter of pride for me that my grandson, who is now 21, once ruefully told his mother that he sent his grandfather a text with “a run-on sentence.”
He won’t “do” a chicken salad, either.
cjon3acd@att.net