Three Coasts

My husband always misuses the word tremendous. He thinks it is a superlative, as in, "I had a tremendous time." He is always describing the very best things as if they were tremendous. I've been married to him for almost eight years, but I've never corrected him, never once told him that tremendous means large, as in tremendous debt.

As an editor by trade, I am often annoyed by abuses of the English language. I cringe at data used in the singular. Impact as a verb is abhorrent. I generally bemoan the sad state of the apostrophe. Hyphens are a daily horror. The comma, a travesty. Don't even get me started on the semicolon.

Not that I'm a purist. A wise person once said that an inflexible language is a dead language. There is a certain latitude one may employ. I have recently accepted into my personal lexicon the word email as a verb. There is a precedent for it: We say that we are going to mail a letter just as easily as we say we're going to deliver the mail.

Although such misuses and abuses usually make me apoplectic, my husband's idiosyncratic vernacular often takes on the quality of an aphrodisiac. It's his bald enthusiasm for the word tremendous that undoes me, his obliviousness to the error. This is a man who can use the word gal without a hint of offensiveness. He isn't some swaggering Neanderthal talking down to the little lady. When he calls me his gal, the word is rooted in the most earnest bluegrass song ever sung. Gal is ringed in daisies, all the petals saying he loves me. It's quite tremendous.