A funny thing, language.

In fact, words in general can be a bit peculiar at times. It's odd how there can be a word that I don't hear or see in years, then all of a sudden it appears three or four times in as many days. ‘Hubris' has just done that to me. Mind you, ‘hubris' always seems an odd sort of a word to me. For a start it sounds as though it should be a synonym for ‘humility' instead of being an antonym. I'm probably the only person in the English-speaking world who thinks that. No, that's not quite true; there are probably quite a few who have never even heard of the word, let alone know what it means. Perhaps we should all be like Tweedledum (or was it Tweedledee?) who claimed that words meant exactly what he wanted them to mean.

When it comes to language, many of us have our own pet quirks or foibles, such as not liking to end a sentence with a preposition. I know that is the correct way, but I do think there are times when throwing the rules to the wind produces something that sounds better. For example, the sentence ‘Who did you give the pen to?' is incorrect, but the correct — or more correct — ‘To whom did you give the pen?' sounds a lot more... Formal? Pedantic? Precious, even? I'm sure that in casual conversation the vast majority of people would end the question with the preposition because it just sounds better.

My own foible is to avoid splitting infinitives whenever possible and I growl and grumble when newsreaders do it on the television. But I have to accept that the split infinitive is sometimes better. (And that's another rule broken: never start a sentence with a conjunction.) Take the old Startrek: ‘to boldly go' is much stronger than ‘to go boldly', although I suppose the writer could have said ‘boldly to go'.

Ah well, language is constantly evolving, and it really doesn't matter that much in day to day situations so long as we understand each other.