Consider This ....

writings on business, self-discovery, and life these days

Myriad Things
by Mary H. Ruth

Of the multiple abuses of the English language that daily shiver the nerves of every educated reader, one of the saddest testimonies to our loss of poetry is evident in the havoc people play with myriad things.

It's a lovely sounding word. Myriad. Strikes a chord, like music, which is why it's so liberally sprinkled around, and also so often insensitively applied.

There are myriad stars, because we can't count them all. Please note that there are not a myriad of stars. Although the latter is technically not incorrect, please consider the loss of poetry that results from that ugly 'of' wedged in-between the awesome uncountable number and the marvelous thing that defies counting.

The designation of myriad denotes wonder, the mystery of the unknown, an unfathomable amount. Very few phenomena should be described as myriad. Butterflies, fish, evils of the world, sparkles in fireworks: such things may be myriad. Tasks you must perform this morning, members of your family, paintings in a gallery, kinds of doughnuts: such as these should not be characterized as myriad for any reason. Krispy Kreme offers hundreds of doughnut types, or a vast array of them, or every-kind-of-doughnut-you-can-think-of; it does not, however, produce myriad doughnuts. The two words exist on entirely different planes.

Myriad has company in its miserable misuse, for we also commonly abuse the force and poetry of the word 'plethora.' Both words suggest huge numbers, but they are opposites in that 'myriad' has positive connotations and 'plethora' has negative ones.

Plethora implies superfluity and waste. It is the grasshopper blight. It's too much of something, resulting in crisis. So it should be used to describe only items you wish to be recognized as exceedingly negative. There may be a plethora of criminals or cars causing pollution; but you'd be unwise to refer to a plethora of new styles or a plethora of benefits for your clientele.

Unlike myriad, 'plethora' is followed by 'of:' a plethora of damaging storms, a plethora of enemy attacks. Listen to the contrasting sounds of the words 'plethora of' and 'myriad.' The former sounds like a pest, the latter like a miracle.

The poetics of language are myriad; let us not defeat their beauty with a plethora of careless writers.