the greycat blog

It’s spreading and it has to be stopped. I refer to the tendency, widespread in the United States but increasingly evident here, to use ‘alternate’ as if it means ‘alternative’.

It doesn’t, and there’s no excuse for getting it wrong. These two words mean quite different things. Here is the distinction, in capitals, so that nobody misses it.

‘ALTERNATE’ MEANS ‘EVERY OTHER’. ‘ALTERNATIVE’ MEANS ‘ANOTHER’.

Visualize yourself on an upper floor in a burning building. In front of you is a staircase, but it is enveloped in flame. ‘Use alternate stairs!’ shouts a voice from somewhere outside. So you do: you set off down the stairs using every other tread, because that is what it means to use alternate stairs. And you burn to death. Your would-be rescuer knew that there was another staircase at the other end of the building, unaffected by the blaze. That’s what he wanted you to know about, and that’s why he should have shouted ‘Use alternative stairs!’

Next week: why you are very stupid if you use ‘decimate’ to mean ‘destroy’.

Back in November I had pedantic remarks to make about a tragic story from Afghanistan: ‘BBC English: the decline and fall continues’. The point was that the BBC, in reporting the possibility that UK ‘friendly fire’ had killed two Danish soldiers, reported the story as MOD investigating claim UK ‘friendly fire’ killed two Danish troops. ‘If one individual had been reported dead’, I mused, ’would the headline have referred to the killing of “one Danish troop”?’

Well, CBS News has indeed broken that particular stupidity barrier with their headline today, reporting on the deaths of three British soldiers in Afghanistan: ‘Afghan Violence Claims 100th British Troop’.

Why is this stupid? Here’s an article that explains all. Here’s another, with added lefty hand-wringing (more of the same here, in the fourth paragraph down).

UPDATE: They’ve corrected it to ‘100th British soldier’, which is nice to see but doesn’t really make up for their initial dumbness.