REALLY JUST ONE THING — ONE WORD THIS TIME. A LISTICLE OF ONE

Things That Piss Me Off

The list is very short this time. I’ve been catching the word “amid” in headlines lately. I’m putting this article out there amid all the other articles about how to write. A more polite title would have been: “How best to use ‘amid,’ and better yet, how to avoid using it at all.”

Amid the grains of sand, there were grains of pure gold and diamond. . . . Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

Amid has a very limited and specific meaning. It is best to limit its use to something among countable nouns. Like shrubs in a hedge, or people on a beach. Maybe grains of sand, but that gets borderline iffy.

How can it make sense when referring to the uncountable? Here’s a common mistake I’m seeing, and yes, it pisses me off. “She had trouble reinventing herself amid (or amidst or among) the coronavirus pandemic.”

Coronaviruses are uncountable. That’s just their nature. A pandemic (usually now a disease, but not always) — is something that affects all humans everywhere. Maybe “all humans” could be countable, but “everywhere” is clearly uncountable, because otherwise what would you find exactly in-between ‘this’ right here and ‘that’ over there?

I’m not entirely a grammar nazi, but I tend to be critical of native English speakers, and more especially publications like the New York Times, when they use such sloppy language. I take it as an insult.

Here’s what I found when I searched a search engine for “amid the pandemic”

Amid Pandemic, Scientists Reassess Routine Medical Care

To be fair to the New York Times, the title was a grammatical crime, but the author was very careful in the text, even using the word “midst” properly. But more importantly, she generally referred to the temporal frame of the pandemic, which obviates the need to struggle over amid, amidst and among. Doesn’t the word “during” just sound better to you?

Oh, by the way. I’m no kind of hack. I read the whole NYT article, and was glad I had, because it was extremely well-written. Save the title. No, I meant “don’t save the title!”

It could have been used in the title. How many readers would you lose if you said “During Pandemic, Scientists…” instead of “Amid Pandemic, Scientists…?”

I think this is a pretty good, surprisingly long article considering that it’s a listicle of one.

Fred