Usage Alert

If you're not into words, skip this, but I just noticed James Fallows, one of the best journalists and smartest users of English on the planet, use a phrase I kind of hate: "in specific." (It's in the fifth line here.) I've never read anything about this but I assume it's a back-formation or parallel to "in general." This might be useful except we already have a couple of better ways to go here: saying "in particular," or saying "to be specific."

Just one of my pet peeves, like saying "squash" when you mean "quash." When I hear that an investigation has been quashed, I imagine adults using some form of bullying chicanery to end it because the fear what will be revealed. When I hear an investigation has been squashed, I imagine some big fat person sitting on and crushing it, like a hat. The image is ridiculous. So if we take the ideal of an open democracy seriously—and yesterday was the Fourth of July here in the good old U.S. of A., then we should at least quash, and not squash, investigations we find inconvenient.