This space generates its greatest response when one of Oil & Gas Journal's editors ventures into a discourse on language.
Readers take seriously the colonial version of the queen's tongue employed in these pages—or at least the employers' thoughts about it.
Indeed, writing about words and grammar can be perilous. Passions about such subjects run high.
Readers seem to relish quarrels over whatever antique rule the writer drags into light from the murky cellars of English instruction. And grammatical lapses in a column on language attract more attention than oil spills. Alas, they happen.
Yet someone must square the corners when communication turns loopy. Someone must ridicule the fad words and pretensions that sterilize writing and speech. Someone must undangle participles and insist that subjects and verbs agree in number. Someone, in other words, must play the grump.
It's a tough job—but a great way to meet people, even if only by e-mail.
Verbal law
The subject this time is the verbal law of universal gravitation, according to which any two words, when repeatedly used next to each other, eventually mate.
The law leaves its imprint everywhere.
An entire generation of English speakers, for example, thinks "alot" is a word. It is not—at least not yet. The phrase "a lot" is a legitimate if inelegant way to express great quantity. But it comprises two words. Usage will someday force a marriage, but it hasn't happened yet.
Here's a tricky one: awhile.
Sometimes the fusion is proper, sometimes not.
Separately, the words "a while" constitute a noun phrase meaning a short time. Together, they form an adverb meaning "for a short time" or "for a while."
Someday, thanks to the verbal law of universal gravitation, we'll use "awhile" as a noun and think nothing about it. Scores of English-speakers already do.
The gravitational attraction between paired words is relentless and, as far as anyone knows, irreversible.
Consider the history of "all right." Who can object to a phrase so clear and concise? Yet the verbal law of universal gravitation has smashed the words together and dismissed an "l."
To people sensitive about these matters, the word "alright" looks wrong. Yet this writer's copy of Webster's New World Dictionary lists the word, defining it as an adverb meaning "all right" with this qualification: "a spelling much used but still generally considered a substandard usage."
There, for everyone to see, is the verbal law of universal gravitation at work.
Resisting the irresistible
The force may be irresistible but must be resisted anyway.
Think about it.
According to the physical law of universal gravitation, the universe might someday exhaust the energy now expanding it. Then gravity will reverse things and force all matter to collapse into itself.
If unmanaged, the verbal law of universal gravitation will produce an analogous result: the welding of all words into one gigantic black hole for the alphabet, a verbal nexus that embodies all meaning and occupies every word-processing program in the universe.
As quickly as words link up these days, the trend definitely points toward that befuddling eventuality. It must be resisted for many reasons, large among them the difficulty of deciding, if the cosmic word ends up beginning with, say, "t," on which page of the dictionary it should appear.
Editors exist to push this calamity as far into the future as possible. We resist the hasty marriage of words but surrender to usage when the battle is lost.
In OGJ's style manual, a word list governing spelling of paired words reflects the struggle.
There you will find one-word spelling for drillbit, drillhead, drillship, drillsite, drillstem, drillstock, and drillstring—but not drill pipe.
Inconsistency? No, deliberation. When we wrote the style manual, OGJ's drilling editor made judgment calls about industry usage.
Where two-word nouns were clearly wrong among drilling professionals, one-word form became OGJ's rule. Everywhere else, two-word form became the rule.
Similar examples abound in other areas, all of them subject to dispute but rigid in OGJ usage until we revisit the subject, which we will.
Language changes for reasons other than the verbal law of universal gravitation. We must stay current.
A last example: "Oil well" and "oil field" remain two words in OGJ usage. Yet we used to write "oilman" and "oilmen."
We don't use those words anymore.
