The collectors of language peeves are annoyed by new words and by not-so-new words acquiring new meanings. The new word is a solution to a problem, but the problem may be invisible to many of us. A shift in one word’s meaning involves shifts in other words’ meanings; as a word acquires new layers of significance and loses others, it keeps different company. This change, too, may be hard to detect.
When we aggregate the keywords of our age, we may wince. Terms that repeatedly crop up in our public discourse that would have seemed strange and obscure to our grandparents include media, multiculturalism, network, otherness, fundamentalism, fetish, globalization, postmodern and indeed discourse. They would probably have been able to work out the meanings of such words, but would have been surprised by our frequent use of them today. Other items might simply have struck them as empty, overblown or superfluous: celebrity, heritage, identity, mobility, communication (as in ‘communication skills’ and ‘interpersonal communication’), culture (with its flows and differences, its relativity and hybridity, and its many offshoots such as nanoculture and cyberculture), community (‘the gay community’, ‘community organizer’), and the emphasis on types of experience – for instance, the management of ‘customer experience’. Then there are all the things labelled ‘alternative’: lifestyles, energy sources, media, therapies, investments, religion.7 I am not condemning any of these words, but their prevalence is indicative of some of the principal features of our society, and each of them, as it has emerged or shifted, has proved troublesome.
A slippery word we encounter almost daily is rights. It is used promiscuously by the architects of international law, by advertisers, and by people who find the word ‘ideals’ insufficiently emotive to suit their polemical ends. Rights are usually perceived in relation to injustice: it is through the repeated failure of justice that people assemble a sense of their entitlements. But promoters of rights rarely see them as the product of a process of trial and error; instead, claims about rights are couched in the language of moral theory, often coloured by the rhetoric of religion. The word rights has a woolly comprehensiveness: legal, political and ethical entitlements are muddled together, and a precise evaluation of duties, responsibilities and powers is lost in the fog of unscientific hooey.
This is sometimes called semantic bleaching: a word’s specific meaning is eroded and, thanks to frequent use, becomes general. The best example is probably the change in the meaning of thing: in Old English it denoted a meeting, especially a judicial assembly, and later it meant a piece of business, but, beginning in the Middle English period, the word was used indefinitely, becoming a convenient term for any object or matter that a person could not (or would not) particularize. Other instances are more recent. ‘No word in English carries a more consistently positive reference than “creative”,’ wrote Raymond Williams in 1961.8 That no longer holds true. It has become a token of humbug, an indicator of soullessness, box-ticking and narcissism. In certain contexts, mainly financial, creative is the equivalent of misleading: we have creative accountancy, for instance, and the creative pricing of products and services.
I have written the last dozen or so paragraphs knowing full well that there are bad habits of which I am guilty. One, common among non-fiction writers, is the use of what Sir Ernest Gowers in his ABC of Plain Words neatly called ‘pushful adjectives of vague intensification’.9 Considerable is the classic example: ‘This is urgent’ manages to convey a greater sense of urgency than ‘This is a matter of considerable urgency’, which sounds stuffy. Gowers might have mentioned adverbs, too. Does ‘The water was very hot’ evoke a stronger impression of heat than ‘The water was hot’? Clearly it is meant to, but the economy of the second version seems more decisive. Whipping up great curds of very-ness is an ineffective strategy. How impressed are we going to be by the assertion that ‘This is very, very, very, very important’? What would an extra very contribute?
In truth, intensifiers are often markers not of importance, but of triviality. If something is ‘a complete disaster’ or ‘an absolute tragedy’, you can be pretty sure it is not a train crash or a devastating tornado. It is much more likely that the words complete and absolute would be omitted in these cases. ‘A total catastrophe’ is a footballer’s blunder in the penalty box or an unsuccessful dinner party, not the destruction of an orphanage. We recognize in the extremity of some words of intensification a parodic excess.
An example of this inflationary practice that we often come across is people’s use of literally when they mean figuratively: ‘The guys making the presentation literally got crucified’, ‘He was offside by literally miles’, ‘My urethra is literally on fire’. Offenders use it to assure us of the veracity of their exaggerations. It is not always a marker of untruth – I may literally be pulling my hair out with anxiety, and may employ literally to help you interpret my meaning correctly – but it smacks of over-affirmation. This is hardly new. In Little Women (1868–9) Louisa May Alcott wrote of ‘an out-of-door tea’ that was ‘always the crowning joy of the day’ because ‘the land literally flowed with milk and honey on such occasions’. The OED cites the actress Fanny Kemble’s statement in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, written in the late 1830s, that ‘For the last four years … I literally coined money.’ In Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) we read that Squeers ‘literally feasted his eyes, in silence, upon the culprit’.
A strange form of pushfulness is the use of like as punctuation – as in, ‘He is so, like, not cool’. Like, rather than achieving its usual effect of approximation or simile, here serves as an intensifier. Many people diagnose it as a tic or as an egotistical defence against being interrupted. They may also feel that the heavy use of like reflects the poverty of a speaker’s vocabulary. It stands in for all the adjectives, verbs and adverbs of which young folks are, like, totally ignorant. Or perhaps it indicates that adjectives, verbs and adverbs no longer feel adequate to convey the mysteries of (perpetual) adolescence.
One influential commentator, Thomas de Zengotita, has argued that the rise of like reflects not the narrowing of vocabulary but ‘the inadequacy of language in principle’. At first the proliferation of like conveyed ‘the futility of trying to put into words what could only be known directly’: now it serves ‘as a kind of quotation mark … [and] introduces a tiny performance rather than a description’. Originally, then, this use of like signalled that an experience – a concert, maybe – was too special to be squeezed into the small containers of everyday words. ‘Led Zeppelin were, like, completely amazing’ was a sentence calculated to make it clear that ‘completely amazing’ was an insufficient plaudit. Later, like became more overtly theatrical. De Zengotita hears it being used to cue ‘a “clip” displaying a message in highly condensed gestural and intonational form’. Whatever follows like is a riff, an impersonation, an act. This use of like has been called ‘quotative’.
For de Zengotita, this is all part of ‘the dance of the moment’.10 He sees modern life as an extended presentation, a perpetual whirl of social showmanship. Like, it seems, licenses its users to be – for a moment – Method actors. That’s certainly how it comes across in the 1982 song ‘Valley Girl’ by Frank Zappa and his then fourteen-year-old daughter Moon Unit, and it was ‘Valley Girl’ that brought the performative like to wide attention. Generations immersed in the simulations of TV are sensitive to the ironies and dramas of their every gesture.
There are other ways of understanding like, though. It can be seen as a form of hedging. The performance it cues may resemble a ritual of uncertainty – which, paraphrased, goes thus: ‘I don’t know if the next word I’m going to say is the right word. I don’t want to look stupid or hasty or dogmatic, so instead of just saying the word straight out I’m going to indicate that it’s here only on probation, awaiting your blessing or improvement.’ Seen thus, like is a form of politeness.
As such, it seems to be related to another mannerism, sometimes referred to as ‘uptalk’ (a term coin
ed by the journalist James Gorman in 1993). Uptalkers avoid flat assertion. Writing in The Times in 2006, Stefanie Marsh characterized this as ‘the rise of the interrogatory statement’:
My sister lives in Los Angeles, and has picked up this irritating verbal tic, ‘uptalk’, which means that she uses an interrogative tone even when making statements such as ‘I never want to talk to you again (?)’ In the old days I could pretend to listen to her on the phone while actually reading a book – I would do this by keeping one ear on her intonation and lobbing a well-placed ‘in principle, I would say yes’, after every one of her high notes. These days when I do that she sighs and says flatly: ‘It wasn’t a question, Stefanie.’11
In 2004, Ian Jack wrote in the Guardian about his eleven-year-old daughter’s style of speech, in which ‘odd, questioning stresses … settle on random words, not necessarily at the ends of sentences (if any sentences happen to be hanging around, that is)’.12
When I first came across this phenomenon – sometimes known by the technical yet not quite accurate name ‘high rising terminal’, or by the less technical and less accurate Australian Questioning Intonation – I imagined it was a mark of self-doubt. But a different and academically accepted view is that uptalk is a means of asserting control; the speaker is requiring me to confirm that I am paying attention – and perhaps even that I agree with what is being said. It may also be practised in a spirit of inclusiveness, to highlight the newness of a piece of information being presented, or to check that we are being understood and aren’t falsely assuming knowledge on the part of our listeners.13
People who adopt these mannerisms do so for the very simple reason that patterns of speech are contagious. The use of individual words is undoubtedly contagious, too. Who hasn’t had the experience of coming across a new word and then extravagantly overusing it? Sometimes, gallingly, the word is one we would profess to dislike; or we initially succeed in resisting some voguish term and then collapse into acquiescence.
As vogue words gain momentum, we may worry that unless we use them the world is passing us by. In 2007 the columnist William Safire wrote about vogue words in the New York Times; he cited as current examples age-appropriate and the expressions ‘to show ankle’ and ‘go figure’.14 Typically, vogue words are rampant for a while, then disappear from view. Alternatively, they stop seeming voguish and become part of the well-worn vocabulary of daily life. In 1947 Eric Partridge could cite as vogue words blueprint, complex as a noun, crisis (which he felt was ‘used with nauseating frequency’), economic and ego.15 Today, a fascination with new terminology means that something can be anointed as the latest buzzword before it has really had an opportunity to prove itself, and the pundits who pick words of the moment can go horribly wrong. In 2007, the word of the year chosen by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary was pod-slurping, a term for illicitly using a storage device such as an iPod to download data from someone else’s computer, and Oxford University Press went for locavore, meaning someone who consumes only food produced locally. I have never heard anyone say either of these words, and have seen them written only in the context of commentators laughing at what poor choices they were. When the pundits do seem to get it right, their verdicts are disquieting. In early 2010 the American Dialect Society declared the verb tweet its top word of 2009. Its word of the decade was the verb google. Both are proprietary names, registered by Twitter and (pretty obviously) Google.
Our attitude to voguish vocabulary reflects our relationship to the newness and strangeness of developments in the world. We expect much of it to fail – to enjoy a moment’s attention and then to disappear. The difficulty is knowing which parts we need to adopt or at least accept; it is hard to predict what will last, although for the most part unobtrusiveness helps a word’s chances more than gaudiness. And while we may find some people’s embrace of evanescent fashions embarrassing, we may also embarrass ourselves by dismissing all novelties as trinkets of the moment.
Change is always happening. It is, as wags like to point out, life’s one constant. Frank Kermode counsels in his book Shakespeare’s Language, ‘We … need to remember how quickly the language of quite ordinary people grows strange, recedes into the past, along with other social practices and assumptions taken for granted in one age yet hard for a later age to understand.’16 It is a curiously easy thing to forget. ‘Curiously’ because the evidence is all around us.
A common concern is people’s failure to distinguish between superficially similar words that have different meanings: fortunate and fortuitous, for instance, or disinterested and uninterested. The distinctions here seem useful. I’ll admit to being irked when I hear someone say simplistic when he means only simple. Equally, one may be niggled by the mixing-up of imply and infer, tortuous and torturous, venial and venal, credible and creditable, regrettably and regretfully, militate and mitigate, derisive and derisory, masterly and masterful, aggravate and irritate, flout and flaunt, compose and comprise, ability and capacity, oral and verbal. (The last of these perhaps requires explanation: all language is verbal, but only speech is oral.) I wince when hysterical is used as a synonym for hilarious. I am not going to have a fit of the vapours, of the kind some delicate souls claim to suffer at such moments, but I feel uncomfortable, and I tell myself that the differences between these words are important. Occasionally, confusion can give rise to unpleasantness: in my case, there was an instance a few years ago when a waitress insisted on passing on to a chef not the congratulations I intended, but something she seemed to think was the same or even better – commiserations.
The trouble is, when I fuss over the distinction between, say, coruscating and excoriating, I am faced with immediate evidence that others do not feel the same way. And history does not always support my case, for not all the supposed differences are borne out by investigation. If we accept the evidence of the OED, disinterested was used to mean ‘not interested’ before it was used to mean ‘impartial’, and uninterested meant ‘impartial’ before it meant ‘indifferent’. In any case, the distinction is now slipping away, as inspection of a corpus of current usage confirms.
Geoffrey Nunberg has done some research into the changing attitudes of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary. In 1969, 43 per cent thought it was ‘acceptable’ to use aggravating as a synonym for irritating; by 1988, this had gone up to 71 per cent. Cohort, used as a term equivalent to conspirator or colleague (i.e. of individuals, not as a collective noun), was acceptable to 31 per cent in 1969, but to 71 per cent in 1988. Yet in some cases the mood had become more conservative over the period Nunberg was considering. In 1969, hopefully as a ‘sentence adverb’ (‘Hopefully, neither side will insist …’) was accepted by 44 per cent; by 1988 the figure was 27 per cent.17
Several of the pairs of words I listed above have superficial similarities that lead to their being mixed up. Flout and flaunt provide an obvious example. The words are sufficiently different that we can tell them apart, but sufficiently similar for many of us to have trouble remembering which one is which. Yet often the problem is pretentiousness rather than confusion. Disinterested sounds more sophisticated than uninterested, as fortuitous sounds more sophisticated than fortunate. This concern with presenting an appearance of sophistication is related to hypercorrection, which I discussed in Chapter 15.
I can’t help suspecting that most of the distinctions discussed in the preceding paragraphs are on their way out. In fact, they may already have been lost. It is disconcerting to realize that one is clinging on to something that has already withered. Yet in some cases it has never been vital. The argument against using hopefully is that the word means ‘in a manner that is full of hope’, so it should only be used of a person or group which is doing something in just that way. ‘Hopefully, the jury will come to a unanimous verdict’ is considered inferior to ‘I hope the jury will come to a unanimous verdict’ – unless we really mean that the jury is hopeful about the effects of such a verdict. This makes sense until we think about
other sentence adverbs such as accordingly, seriously, understandably, amazingly, frankly and honestly. A sentence adverb presents the attitude of the speaker or author, rather than the attitude of the sentence’s subject. The comma following the adverb signals this: ‘Honestly, you are a total liar’ leaves no room for confusion, whereas without a comma there is ambiguity.
When I was younger, one of the most common complaints I heard about any aspect of the English language was the change in the use of the word gay. This perfectly good equivalent to bright and fun, so the argument went, had been converted into a term – first of denigration, then of celebration – for homosexuals. Now, the grounds for complaint have changed; the word has become a throwaway insult. When in 2006 the Radio 1 presenter Chris Moyles described a ringtone as ‘gay’ during his breakfast show, he defended himself against charges of homophobia by claiming that it was a synonym for ‘rubbish’. He was supported by the BBC. In fact, the history of the word is complicated. As early as Chaucer it had connotations of lasciviousness, and by the Elizabethan period it had overtones of uninhibited hedonism. From the 1790s it acquired the sense ‘living by prostitution’: the gay ladies of Covent Garden were tarts, not lesbians, and in Victorian newspapers the word appears euphemistically in reports about brothels. Early in the nineteenth century ‘gay instrument’ was a term for the penis. The association of ‘gay’ with homosexuality predates the Second World War. Its slangy dismissiveness is traced back by the OED as far as a novel about skateboarding that appeared in 1978.
For many, the BBC’s defence of Moyles was evidence of its decadence and impending collapse. Long regarded as a stronghold of traditional values, a spiritual influence as well as a cultural one, it has become a target for critics of corporate profligacy. In common with the leading newspapers, it is endlessly berated for its lax use of English. Lord Reith, the BBC’s founder, proposed that its announcers adopt a uniform approach to pronunciation, and an Advisory Committee on Spoken English was set up in 1926. Its first list of recommendations was published two years later, containing advice on such matters as where to put the stress in chastisement (on the first syllable, apparently), the preferability of airplane to aeroplane, and the three different pronunciations of Leghorn.18 Subsequent volumes included guidance on how to pronounce tricky names – chiefly those of places (Hiroshima, Uruguay) and people (Quiller-Couch, Wemyss).
The Language Wars Page 34