No More Visitations!

I recently saw a road sign that said "signalised intersection ahead". I thought to myself: signalised? In what sense signalised? What could an intersection signal?

Of course, what the sign meant to say was that signals were being inserted at the intersection. And while I agree that the signwriters couldn't reasonably be expected to put all that on a road sign, I am frankly getting sick of this use of nouns as verbs.

I could list a whole phalanx of examples, but I'll provide just one - and, from my experience, the worst.

Visitation. I don't know about you, but this one really annoys the crap out of me. Everything - and I mean everything - is a "visitation". For example, at the union, we have occassional "visitation" programs. What they really mean is that they have visiting programs, when we go and conduct visits of various workplaces. And nor is this mere pedantry, or semantics. Because there are two things wrong with the use of "visitation": one, it's definitionally incorrect; two, it's grammatically incorrect.

Regarding the definition, a visitation is something that happens when you see lights from heaven and hear angelic choirs and suddenly some otherwordly being is standing before you. As in when Mary received a visitation from the Archangel Gabriel to tell her that she was pregnant with Jesus. Or when Paul had his "road to Damascus" experience. Some people even claim to have had visitation experiences from creatures descending from UFOs. Either way, a visitation involves an experience in which you are the subject of an encounter with something (or someone) inexplicable.

And that last fact points to the grammatical error: a visitation is something that happens to you - it is not something you do you other people. You go and visit other people - you don't impose a visitation upon them, you just go and see them. A visit, nothing more. There's nothing otherwordly about it, regardless of what our own egos might like to think. And it's what we do to them, not what they do to us. In a visit, the other is the subject; in a visitation, we are the subject.

Thus, at the union, we might go on a visiting program, but I don't think any of us, even in our most hubristic moments, are kidding ourselves that we're impressing anyone with bolts of blinding light out of the sky. Usually, it takes something much more sinister to happen before people appreciate the benefits of union membership.

Anyhoo, you see my point. People are using words incorrectly in order to express themselves, usually because it's easier to do so than actually think about correct grammatical use. Not that I expect this to change despite my fulminations. Indeed, and paradoxically, it's probably a good thing that it doesn't stop: it marks one more point upon the history of the evolution of the English language, a flexibility that has enabled it to grow from an obscure Germanic dialect into the global language of our planet.

It just wrankles to be on the losing side of an evolutionary battle!

Talk to you soon,

BB

Quote for the Day: We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves. (John Locke)