The present perfect

The Word

December 11, 2011|By Erin McKean

At this time of year, you can hardly glance at any publication without getting advice on choosing the perfect gift, often with alarming levels of specificity. You can find not just gifts for your mom, but gifts for your hang-gliding, cheese-loving, basket-weaving mom--gifts you can personally basket weave to hold her cheese while she hang glides. Multiply this times every significant person in your life, at price points ranging from “if you have to ask...” to “absolutely free,” and you have a solid plan for holiday overload.

Language columnists are not immune to the desire to provide helpful munerary advice (here’s one little present for you: munerary is a rare and more-or-less obsolete word that means “relating to gifts”). Usually this advice runs to lists of reference books that make great gifts. Everyone enjoys getting a new dictionary as a present, right? Or perhaps that’s just us.

But there are plenty of nonmaterial language gifts you can deliver this holiday season, without having to compile a comprehensive tastes-and-hobbies dossier first--and with no wrapping required. In fact, you don’t even have to announce that you’re giving these presents--treat them as anonymous spirit-of-the-season gifts, perhaps in addition to whatever fruitcakes or knit scarves you’re wrapping for loved ones.

The first and biggest gift of language is one that is always welcome, especially at this time of year, and it doesn’t require you to do anything. In fact, it requires you to do nothing, particularly if you’re a “correcting” person. As a holiday present this year, you can give the silent gift of slack.

If you routinely or absentmindedly murmur “between you and me” whenever someone says “between you and I,” or stop a conversation to say, “Wait, you were literally blown away? To where?”, why not see if you can turn off the part of your brain that rises to a grammar peeve like a fish to a lure? I’d bet it’s less than one time in ten that a minor grammatical faux pas blocks the sense of a message from getting through. By giving free passes on these little foibles throughout the holiday season, you may end up hearing more of what’s being said to you, and connecting better with the people doing the talking. This is the perfect gift for relatives and close friends--they’re sure to appreciate it.