(and with apologies to Monty Python for the oblique reference to the Church Police sketch)
A European product called Bio-Oil is being marketed on American TV ads during weekday soap operas. It allegedly reduces the obviousness of scars, stretch marks, and uneven skin tones, which is a most useful product innovation, indeed. [If it works as advertised, of course.--Ed.]
Normally, I'd be willing to cut non-native speakers of English a little slack when they make grammatical errors. English as a language is positively fiendish and difficult to master, even for native speakers. However, in this case, I don't feel quite so generous.
The error? An incorrect preposition: a woman in the commercial says she is "embarrassed with" her stretch marks. One can be "embarrassed by." One can be "embarrassed about." One can even be "embarrassed for." One cannot, however, be "embarrassed with." Not properly, that is. I'll be among the first to admit that prepositions in English are especially tricky. Most of them grew organically, before people got the bright idea to make language make sense; thus, prepositions are hard to explain in nice, neat, comprehensive-but-simple rules. The vast majority of them are idiomatic. [Hey--I said idiomatic, not idiotic.--Ed.]
So why am I reluctant to be kind? The woman doing the speaking doesn't sound like a non-native speaker of English. She sounds 100% American. If the company marketing Bio-Oil could go to all the trouble of finding an American to read its advertising copy, it could have found someone capable of editing that copy correctly.
The underlying reason I'm cranky about this is that every day, I see more examples of people misusing prepositions, which makes what they are trying to say incomprehensible--and which furthermore makes it nearly impossible to teach our impressionable, TV-guzzling youth to do, say, or speak any better.
T.S. Eliot was correct when he wrote "This is the way the world will end, not with a bang but a whimper." Alas for us, the whimper is going to be "But I didn't understand what you meant . . ."
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