Word peeve: Could you care any less?

Are you one of the people who says, "I couldn't care less"? Or are you one of those who says, "I could care less"? (We'll talk about inside vs. outside punctuation another day.) Which is correct?

Well, let's consider the derivation of the phrase, as an extreme version of "I don't care."  It goes like this:

I don't care about it.

I really don't care about it. Not at all. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

In fact, I care so little about it that you can't even measure how little I care about it.

There is no way in this world I could possibly care any less about it, than I do right now. It's a mathematical impossibility. You can't care less than zero.

In other words, I couldn't care less.

That works for me. So what's the derivation of the other one? I dunno. All I can think of is this:

I don't care about it.

But if you argue with me, and insist that I do care, even a smidgen, then I could probably force myself to care even less, just to prove to you that I don't care. But it's not worth the effort.

Nope. It sounds too contrived to me. I'm sure they're both listed in the dictionary, just because the "could" one has been in use for over 50 years.

But I'll insist that it's still wrong, and I will kick until my feet are bloody against this cursed evolution of the English language. I know that none of you care. In fact, you probably couldn't care any less.

My feet are all bloody, and nobody cares. *sob*

Word peeve: The proof is emphatically NOT in the pudding.

A long time ago (relatively speaking), the English language included a useful proverb about pudding. Let's take this proverb into the 21st Century, and go into any gelateria. You go in and look at all the gelato behind the glass panel, and you see one called "mascarpone". The description sounds pretty good, so you ask the clerk "Is it any good?" The clerk pulls out a tiny plastic spoon, scoops up a sample and lets you try it.

Why?

Because if she just tells you it's good, you'll have to take her word for it. The proof of whether mascarpone-flavored gelato is any good comes from actually tasting a sample.

In other words, "the proof of the gelato is in the tasting."

Now go back in time a century or more, into Jolly Olde England, and try the same experiment with a pudding vendor in the streets of London. You don't know whether the pudding is any good until you try it yourself. Hence, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

It's another way of saying "try before you buy". We use the concept when buying automobiles, home entertainment systems, tuxedos and fancy dresses.

But sometime in the end of the 20th Century, some ignorant mangler of the English language got it wrong, and said "The proof is in the pudding." And it stuck.

The proof OF WHAT is in the pudding? Did you stick raisins in it? Do you want me to go digging around in it with a spoon, looking for hidden treasure?

The proof of the quality of the pudding lies in the eating of it, not in its ingredients or in its mere existence.

Word peeve: nuclear

In my previous two peeves, I pointed out a couple of metaphors that get regularly mangled. Somebody is sure to tell me that the English language is constantly evolving, and I might as well accept the fact that these mangled metaphors are part of that evolution. To this, I reply "Oh, I hope not."

However, I think may as well wave the white flag on this next one.

Nuclear power entered civilization's collective consciousness with a bang - two bangs, in fact, in Japan, in 1945. Fortunately, those were the only two times that the nuclear demon has been unleashed in anger. After the war, the demon was harnessed and put to work to create steam and electrical power.

Along the way, English-speaking people began increasingly to mispronounce the word "nuclear". It's like the missing "r" in "library" and "February": some do, some don't, and the ones that do, sound stupid. I'm sorry, but it's true.

The correct pronunciation is "NOO-clear". Or maybe "NOOK-lear". They sound the same to me.

The wrong pronunciation is "NOOK-you-ler." It sounds like "jugular", but with "nuke" replacing "jug". If that were the right way to say it, wouldn't we spell it "nucular"? But we don't, do we?

Go ahead and call me intolerant. I'm also intolerant of the sound of fingernails scratching on a chalkboard, and "nucular" sounds about the same to me as those fingernails.

But like I said, I'm fighting a losing battle. U.S. President Jimmy Carter always pronounced it "NOOK-you-ler". Before he was president, he was a millionaire peanut farmer. And before that, he was an officer in the U.S. Navy.

In the submarine corps.

As a nuclear engineer.

And he has a lot more credibility than I do.

Word peeve: "home in" versus "hone in"

This one's a little more insidious. It can't be blamed solely upon the Internet, and we can only blame TV for its spread, not its origin. I don't even know where it originated, but I've heard some respected and intelligent people making this mistake.

You've heard of homing pigeons, right? You can take them hundreds of miles from their home, release them, and after enough time, you can find them back at their home.

In the 20th century, air forces invented a type of missile called a "homing missile" - you know, like a "homing pigeon." Just as a homing pigeon could find its way to its destination without guidance, so a homing missile could find its way to a target without any guidance from the pilot who fired the missile. The Sidewinder heat-seeking missile is the most well-known example of a homing missile.

A homing missile finds its target, and then "locks on" to the target, getting progressively closer to it until it hits it. This is called "homing in." A related metaphor is "zeroing in."

Somewhere along the line, someone substituted an "n" for the "m", and "honing in" was born. The reverse etymology for this term referred to honing as the act of putting a sharper edge on a knife or an axe, so that it could penetrate difficult material better.

But "homing in" with an "m" is the act of focusing on something and steering ever closer to it, ignoring any distractions or obstacles, and the metaphor of the homing missile makes sense. Trying to use "honing in" with an "n" in the same way makes no sense at all. In fact, it sounds stupid.

I'll bet people that say "honing in" also say "NOOK-you-ler" instead of "NOO-clear."

And with those last two sentences, I'm sure I've offended somebody. I'm sorry. And now I'm done.

Word peeve: "rein" versus "reign"

Part of the fallout from (a) the culture's increasing dependence on television and visual media, and (b) the stream-of-consciousness writing that infests the Web, is that we're seeing a lot more poor writing.  Excessive amounts, maybe.  Take the confusion between "rein" and "reign" in two common figures of speech.

Oh. You didn't know there was a difference?

"Reign" is what a king does. It's synonymous with "rule".  "Reins" are the leather straps attached to a horse's bridle, which a rider uses to control a horse. Got it? Now let's look at the confusion between the two.

If you are riding across the prairie and you want to let the horse decide where to go, you hold the reins very loosely, with a lot of slack in them, even to the extreme of letting go and leaving them dangling around his neck. That's called giving the horse "free rein."

When you let your kids run around the house like crazy, you may think you're giving them "free reign," because you're letting them be their own bosses. But the original term had to do with horses and reins, not with kings or their subjects.

Back to the horse. If you're galloping across the prairie and the horse is going too fast for your safety or comfort, you slow the horse down by pulling on the reins. The harder you pull, the more abruptly the horse comes to a stop. Because you are pulling the reins tight, we say that you are "reining in" the horse - reestablishing your control over the steed. Other related metaphors, all of which address the assertion of control over an out-of-control agent, are "keeping someone on a short leash" and "putting on the brakes."

There is no "reigning in" somebody. You can't even invent an etymology that goes with that. "Reigning in" makes as much sense as "a short leech" or "putting on the breaks." Don't do it.