Originally Posted by
Gordiep
In most examples of the new usage I've found, the idea seems to be that the speaker is 'pulling together all his various faculties' in order to fully concentrate them on the task at hand.
Honestly, I have trouble buying this. It sounds like a rationalization to me. People use "concerted" to mean "strenuous" partly because they forget (if they ever knew) that to do things in
concert is to do them with other people, and partly because it sounds a lot like "concentrated."
And, of course, partly because they have heard or read it being used properly to describe an effort by two or more people:
Owing to a concerted effort by members of the community, the old church was saved from demolition. A person who doesn't know the etymology can easily, and wrongly, assume that
concerted in this case means that the members of the community worked really hard, rather than that the members of the community pooled their efforts.
The phrase is pretty common in college-level compositions,
I think it can be generally agreed that "college-level" does not mean what it once did.
That said, I realize the foolishness of our using a formal lexical reference to adjudicate usage in informal speech. Webspeech is interesting for how it bridges between spoken and written language, which were generally distinct prior to instant electronic communication. Unless a site strives for journalistic or literary credibility (Slate, NYT, etc), I don't think that it should be held to strict rules, if such things exist. Most linguists recognize that usage is all about context and audience.
True enough. But I think part of the context here involves this guy setting himself up as some sort of authority and mercilessly skewering people who don't follow his rules. Even when it's done in good fun, as is obviously the case here, it's always considered part of the game for members of the audience to try to catch such a person committing errors.