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September 21, 2004
around, about, and go to
If you hang around social and political activists nowadays, you'll hear them say things like, "That organization does work around brownfields regulation," or "We had a great conversation around making our messaging work more impactful." If you spend your time with humanities scholars, you'll hear sentences like, "Nabokov's later texts are about the primacy of the personal," or "The discourse of late modernity is about alienation." And lawyers have always been taught to say, "This testimony goes to my client's whereabouts on the night of Sept. 20" or "That point goes to Justice O'Connor's dictum in City of Richmond v Croson ...."
These are three ways of connecting bodies of words, on one hand, to particular issues or subjects, on the other, when the speaker is not sure about the nature of the connection. Obviously, it's better to avoid any of these expressions, which are overly vague. However, we all have our linguistic weaknesses, and I find the differences in dialect interesting.
Posted by peterlevine at 1:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack