Singular or plural?
Media, agenda and trivia are three Latin words frequently used in English, and often there is confusion about their singular and plural forms. Traditionally medium is singular (Television as a medium of education), and media plural (The mass media are vastly important today) when speaking of ways of transmitting information. Journalistic prose invariably uses media is…, which should be avoided. However, when you are sitting down for a session of planchette, then the person through which the spirit supposedly communicates is the medium, whose plural is mediums. Although plural in Latin, agenda is now strictly singular in English. So correct usage will be this agenda and these agendas. But unlike agenda, the Latin plural trivia remains plural in English. So it is wrong to write This trivia doesn’t bother me, and the correct usage is These trivia don’t bother me. The singular form, trivium, is never used in English. Trivia has an interesting history. It entered medieval English from the Latin trivium, meaning “a place where three roads meet”. A medieval trivium was an introductory course at university involving the study of grammar, rhetoric and logic. In the Middle Ages, seven “liberal arts” were recognized, of which the trivium contained the lower three and the quadrivium the upper four (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). This association with elementary subjects led to trivial being used to mean “of little value or importance” from the 16th century.
Titles and articles
Just as it is wrong to write Shakespeare’s the last play, it would be incorrect to write Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The correct form is Shakespeare’s Tempest, Homer’s Iliad, Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. If another word intervenes, however then the article must be kept — Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Homer’s great epic The Iliad. (By the way, The Tempest is not Shakespeare’s last play, Two Noble Kinsmen is.)
Meet and speak
You can, god forbid, meet with an accident, but it’s preferable to meet George W. Bush rather than meet with him. The with should definitely be avoided in the latter case. It is all right, though, to meet up with your friend for coffee and conversation, but this usage has the sense of a deliberately fixed up appointment. Similarly speak to is much better than speak with. Using with with meet or speak is common these days, particularly in the American media. But it is best not to get used to it, and be sensitive to how awfully unpolished it sounds in conversation.
Redundancies
The adjective, new, in all the following phrases is redundant, and each of the words stands best on its own: new beginning, new creation, new innovation, new recruits, new record, new renovations, and new tradition. Similarly the old in old adage and old veterans should be dropped.
Total extinction and totally destroyed would be much better without the totally, the past in past history is not needed, and it is better to pay the debt than pay off the debt. For the sake of verbal minimalism, judgments and explosion sound better, and make better sense (when you come to think of it), than value judgments and violent explosions respectively.
