VOCABULARY. **** # 71013.

ROLCAM · Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 1:05 am Post subject: VOCABULARY. **** # 71013.

These 'Choices' Are Not Choice .

Today, some random dispatches from the word front…

-- Poor choices -- The word "choice" has become the word of, well … choice these days. NBC anchorman Brian Williams, for instance, sometimes signs off by humbly acknowledging, "We know you have many choices for your evening newscast, and we thank you for choosing us." Gee, you're welcome, Mr. Heep.

Similarly, a TV commercial for a local optician concedes, "We know there's a lot of choices when it comes to eyeglasses." I'm suddenly envisioning that oculist's billboard in "The Great Gatsby": "When it comes to Woodrow Wilson-style bifocals, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg knows you have many choices."

The overused "choice" has also weaseled its way into the bathetic melodrama of apology. When people do something wrong these days -- park illegally, drive drunk, trigger World War III -- they're likely to confess, "I made a poor choice." "Hmmm… Should I pull out a gun and rob this bank, or maybe just verify my account balance?"

After getting lost on a hike last month, I concocted a new version of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Chosen … er, Taken": "Two roads diverged in a wood last summer, and I made a poor choice -- bummer!"

-- Oopsie! -- Speaking of poor choices, why does every crook, criminal and crony seem to describe his or her wrongdoing as a "mistake"? This annoys Jan Christensen of Cheshire, Conn., who wrote, "Each and every human malfunction has become a MISTAKE."

She cited the response of a woman who had been caught embezzling: "You know what she said, right? 'Oh, it was just a MISTAKE!' She treated it as if she had used the pepper instead of the salt on her burger."

Another revised Frost poem: "He shakes his harness bells with gravity, to ask if there's been some depravity."

-- Meantime, Back at the Rant -- A reader from Pittsburgh, Pa., wonders why so many TV news anchors are using "meantime" instead of "meanwhile," as in, "Meantime, the accused embezzler denies any wrongdoing."

Usage authorities disagree about the acceptability of the adverbial "meantime." Some accept it as a handy shortening of "in the meantime"; after all, people have been using it that way for centuries. Others say "meantime" is a noun and should never be used as an adverb.

Meanwhile, I'd say the adverbial "meantime" is OK in conversational, anchor-people gibber jabber, but I'd avoid it in formal prose.

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Roland Camilleri

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Sydney , Australia.