In regard to the English language, my question is, “Where’s it at?”

I mean by that, in what condition do we find it these days?

The question arises because in a March 17 essay on these pages, “The dying (or dead) art of rhetoric,” one Bree Barton lamented that linguistic grace, and just plain linguistic common sense, have gone a-glimmering. This is so.

As a for-instance, Barton provided an example that I would like for you to contemplate: the statement by a TV newscaster that an at-large child rapist “slipped through the cracks.”

Terming the unintended double entendre “cringeworthy,” Barton complained that it was symptomatic of usage that has reduced thoughtful English to “a dying art — if it hasn’t succumbed to a gruesome murder already.”

Barton should be grateful, though, that the newscaster at least got the idiom right. After all, many speakers today talk of something falling “between” the cracks — where, of course, exists a solid surface.

About the aforementioned and dopey “Where’s it at?,” one wonders whatever happened to “Where is it?” I’d like for you to contemplate that — after kindly removing the equally dopey “for” from this sentence. It’s more than what I can bear (kindly strike that vacuous “what,” as well).

These latter barbarities are becoming universal, so much so that one fears they will soon be deemed standard — much the same as brand names that seep into the public domain through unchallenged usage.

Challenge we must.

This infection of the language runs a gamut from the puerile to the pompous: Woe betide the advertising copywriter who urges us to buy when we can be exhorted to “purchase.” And woe betide the sports writer who would say last year that a tear on pitcher Josh Beckett’s finger was anything other than an “avulsion.”

Moreover, whatever happened to the days when some unfortunate being simply vanished? According to the newscasters, that doesn’t happen any more; nowadays, people “go missing.” I long for those times before the word “disappear” went missing.

Even the high-profile Barack Obama, noted for oratorical skill, isn’t above committing misdemeanors of language. He recently announced a forthcoming speech by saying it would let him discourse in a manner “a lot more fulsome than a press conference.”

I disagree. I’d say that political press conferences and political speeches are equally fulsome, since my dictionary defines the word as “offensively excessive or insincere . . . loathsome, disgusting.”

It’s clear that we need to get our language some protection — to move it into a sphere that both TV and print would enthusiastically term a “safe haven.”

It’s our sworn duty, for sure, to keep the Mother Tongue secure, far from all those unsafe havens of the world.

— Gerry Goldstein ( gerry76@cox.net)