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This is who they got to play Chun Li in the new Street Fighter movie? I don’t know. I’m not really pulling a Chun Li vibe here.

I complain too much about things that bug me, so in the interest of being described with an adjective other than “cantankerous”, I’m now going to talk about something I like.

Fat-free Fig Newtons! I’ve just discovered I love them. The fig part is nice, but what I really dig is the cake portion, which has just the right chewy, obviously-mass-produced texture.

I’m late to the Fig Newton party because the TV commercials that ran circa 1990, when I was an impressionable youth, were ridiculous. As I recall, they were all variations on the assertion that Fig Newtons are not cookies. And? Broccoli florettes aren’t cookies, either. That’s why I don’t like them.

I’m glad I decided to mention this, too, because in doing my thirty seconds of research I found out that Fig Newtons, like all good things, came from the Boston area. I always assumed there was an Isaac Newton connection, but nope, it’s named after Newton, Massachusetts, where I used to work.

Everyone has their pet peeves, things that drive them crazy more than they can justify rationally. Mine is when people say “jive” when they mean “jibe”. What’s the difference? From Common Errors in English:

“Jibe” means “to agree,” but is usually used negatively, as in “the alibis of the two crooks didn’t jibe.” The latter word is often confused with “jive,” which derives from slang which originally meant to treat in a jazzy manner (“Jivin’ the Blues Away”) but also came to be associated with deception (“Don’t give me any of that jive”).

Seems pretty straightforward to me, but I see people saying “that doesn’t jive with X” on the Internet fairly often. So following the old adage “it’s better to start a microblog than curse the darkness”, I bring you Jive Suckas on Twitter, a catalog of jive sightings in the wild. (You can follow it there or on the sidebar of this blog.)

I should clarify that I’m not trying to shame people who get it wrong (maybe just a little). I don’t mind when it crops up in somebody’s personal blog or a forum thread, but if you’re getting paid to write for a blog, or trying to produce professional-quality writing, you are fair game! In fact, what bugs me is that smart people who are good writers make this mistake all the time. So I’m doing this to Raise Awareness, like all those people I went to college with who never changed squat.

Why does the jive thing bug me so much? Definitions change, after all. Someone on the Joel on Software message board pointed out:

I would guess that “jibe” came first (with this meaning), and people started mis-hearing it as “jive”. In fifty years, the dictionary will probably define them as synonyms. Words do change their meanings, and this is one way it happens.

OK, sure, but in the meantime I think we should use agreed-upon definitions for words and call things what they are. I’m not a “grammar Nazi”, I’m an accuracy enthusiast. To quote Common Errors again:

You have the right to express yourself in any manner you please, but if you wish to communicate effectively, you should use nonstandard English only when you intend to, rather than fall into it because you don’t know any better.

That’s my deal, basically. If you really have a good reason for saying jive when the word is actually jibe, go with God! But if you’re going on a hazy understanding, then come on, pro bloggers — we can do better!

While we’re at it, for a far broader examination of this sort of thing, check out The Eggcorn Database, which catalogs spurious expressions like “for all intensive purposes”, phrases which ought to get you suspended from the Internet.