LEND ME YOUR EAR: HOPE SPRINGS INFERNAL

On Sunday morning, May 26, Charles Kuralt interviewed a group of Chapel Hill graduating seniors about their expectations for employment following graduation. An attractive young lady was the first candidate to appear on TV. "Sometimes you get a rejection on your applicant," was the way she summarized her experiences so far.

Whatever the girl's chosen field, her failure to distinguish between applicant and application hasn't helped her unless it was a one-time slip.

Another personable young miss expressed misgivings because the "competition is so high." In my view, competition may be tough, keen, even fierce, but somehow, in the sense of competition, high doesn't quite measure up! At least it's very far down on the list of synonyms.

The next interviewee, as likeable as the first two, averred: "With a college degree, you expect oh, you are so great!" We understood she was trying to express her pride in having earned a college diploma, but university graduates are expected to converse in sentences, especially when approached by notables of Kuralt's stature.

My hope was that the young ladies I heard were selected at random. It's also possible that they were nervous about being on TV, though today's young people are hardly camera-shy. Consider, as well, that the language perpetrated by many public speakers sets poor examples for those who want to learn, an observation you have read in these columns more times than you care to count.

A short while back, a TV staffer announced that "parts of Bangladesh were shook by a storm." The principal parts of shake are shake, shook, shaken, and structure required shaken. As I have stressed in earlier columns, failure to learn simple verb forms marks one as either unschooled or a dullard.

Another regular on TV reported that a nearby city "faces to lose help from the government." How do you face to lose? Certainly you lose face for your cause, but idiom requires that you be "likely to lose" help from the government.

This may be hard to believe, but we have TV announcers of both sexes, young and old, who think "news" is construed in the plural. Last week, a young lady of obvious breeding informed us that "This past week there were some special economic news." Everyone has heard "There are no news, not a single new," but Queen Victoria was joking. It seems people who opt for news as a career would have enough respect for their calling to understand how to speak of it, but the lady herein quoted is only one of many underachievers in this regard.

However, we've heard worse from a commentator reporting on cancer research: "There's a difference between what insecticides does to rats than humans." Rewrite this comment correctly and win a can of insecticide, then spray it wherever you think it will do the most good present company excepted.

An American networker, speaking from South Africa, announced that "a bloody have taken place among the tribes." A bloody what? This is British slang, and an adjective and need I repeat that a singular subject demands a singular verb?

Sen. Kennedy's misuse of the language has been noted in these columns before; he uses myself, a reflexive pronoun, to conceal his ignorance of the proper constructions of I and me, coverups being his specialty. The most recent evidence of his lapses in language turned up in the excuse he gave when questioned about leaving the scene when his visiting nephew needed him: "If I knew they wanted me to stay," said the senator, "I woulda stayed."

Never mind "woulda" that's dialect. It was the fond uncle's saying "If I knew" for "If I had known" that showed again how little the uncle profited by attending the best schools in the country. Ignorance of parallel tenses is common these days, but the senator wasn't born yesterday. In his day, truancy would have been his only escape. (Shouldn't we give him the benefit of a doubt somewhere along the line?)

Now for one more gaffe from one more reporter. Just in time to lighten things up, a TV staffer informed us that "Moslems believe Mohammed descended to heaven" when he left their world. If a god descends to heaven, where does Satan hide out? In liquor stores, at drug dealers's doors, or heavy metal concerts?

Take heart. A humorist on U.S. Farm Report last weekend promised farmers and viewers alike that "hope springs infernal."