I’ve written a lot about English here, so I can only hope I haven’t made a butt of myself rattling on about it.

I leave that for you to judge.

For what it’s worth, here’s a good principle to guide one’s writing. Get out of the way! Let English do its thing. Writers, stop padding your work to make yourselves sound more weighty and official. And when you sweep away the unnecessary stuff, be ruthless.

Incidentally, I don’t consider frowned-upon bits of English that would snap the tight bun over an old-timey school marm’s grey hairs as out of bounds. We use forms like ain’t and y’uns in everyday speech, and we write sentences that end in a preposition, or even, here and there, dangle a participle, oh the h0rror.

Do these add flavor and texture to the spoken word and creative writing? You bet they do. That’s how we speak. Any writer worth his or her salt wants to capture that. Such words have their place. Imagine some crazed editor who, in the name of “correct” English, strikes “ain’t,” for example, from “Huckleberry Finn.” That would be a vampire editor, out to drain the book of its blood

But to the point.

My wife Ann’s family is from Nebraska. And when she said one day, “I have boughten the groceries,” I did not look down my nose or criticize her. I listened with real interest. Turns out that “boughten” is, or was, a Midwest past participle alternative to “bought.” And that’s how her Nebraska-born parents said it in the home in which Ann grew up.

For what it’s worth, English’s forebear, Anglo-Saxon, offered two sorts of past participles: one set, derived from verbs like “eat” and “choose,” takes the “-en,” giving us “eaten” and “chosen.” And the other set, derived from verbs like “buy,” and “catch,” uses the simple past form of the verb, here, “bought” and “caught.”

Yeah, the form we use comes off as a bit arbitrary. Yet I don’t know of anyone who would use “boughten” in a news story outside of a quote. That’s because certain contexts demand we be as clear and as precise as possible.

The news profession, my profession, whose practitioners should know better, is often bad at this, padding copy with bits of “newspeak,” too numerous to count.

So, here are some of my bugbears.

“The house is located at 143 Roosevelt Lane.” We don’t need to say “located” — it is understood. So again, get out of the way and let English do its job. Better to say, “The house is at 143 Roosevelt Lane,” and avoid weighing down the poor sentence with unnecessary freight.

And:

“The meeting will start at 7 p.m.” Ditch that for “the meeting starts at 7 p.m.” And who says, “The tide will come in at 9 o’clock,” instead of “The tide comes in at 9 o’clock?” No one I know. The explanation is that in both cases, we are dealing with what linguists call “scheduled futures,” events we know are going to happen. The corollary is that we don’t say, “It rains tomorrow,” because, you know, maybe it won’t.

Here are some lazy word choices:

“The police descended on the den of criminals.” Aarghh! Unless they dropped from the sky, as cops do sometimes, it’s not even true. A better phrasing would be “converged on.” That’s what mortal, earthbound things do in such circumstances — they “converge on,” a central point.

Today there are phrasings in news copy chosen to avoid offending delicate sensibilities, like:

“The twister left 103 dead.” Do you mean the tornado passed over that region without resurrecting the dead? Bad twister! In my opinion, it’s better to be direct, and say, “The twister killed 103 people.” They died. That’s the blunt truth. Why beat around the bush?

This last one I genuinely despise.

“People experiencing homelessness.” My preference would be to ditch “experiencing.” We’d never say, “The Great Gildersleeve is experiencing cancer,” or “Joe is experiencing a cold.” We’d say “Gildersleeve has cancer” and “Joe has a cold.”

Personally, I prefer “houseless” over homeless because of that old denotation-connotation issue, which distinguishes “house,” in its simplest use, as a shelter over one’s head, from “home” with everything warm and familial it connotes. What people living on the streets need most, for starters, is a house.

Once a television reporter doing a story about homelessness interviewed a little girl who was then living with her parents in the family car. What she said showed she understood the distinction better than the news guys: “We have a home,” the girl said, “we just don’t have a house to put it in.”

I also look to Shakespeare’s King Lear at the moment when the king, wandering outside of his castle in a torrential downpour, comes face to face with a babbling man in torn and tattered clothes who is pretending to be out of his mind. The King looks at him and says:

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?”

Note: the king does not say, “How shall your heads experiencing homelessness…”

Good enough for me.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.