Comments about ‘Watch yer language! Don't hearken back’

Perhaps we should eschew such obfuscation, and just say 'listen'.

Thanks for for the history lesson. "Hark, the herald angels sing..." now makes sense. I guess I could have looked it up.

A little knowledge of the origins of idioms helps in their proper usage. By the time a phrase (like "hark back") has become commonplace in a new application, its original sense is usually long forgotten. I have seen people write "tow the line" frequently (instead of "toe the line"), showing that they fail to understand its literal meaning of standing with feet to a line on the ground, an image that supports the figurative sense of submitting to an authority.

Today, soccer players hear their coaches telling them to "Mark your man!" which harks back to the Shakespearean usage: "Pay attention to" as in "Mark my words."

However, this is the least of our worries. Not one American in ten knows the difference between "lie" and "lay" (nor their past tenses) or between "few" and "less." They use them interchangeably. The most egregious modern error is using two conditional phrases together as in "If I would have gone, I would have known," instead of the correct "If I HAD known..."

I won't even bring up the slaughtering of personal pronouns like "me and him went to the movies."