The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time
Page 13
The most widely understood sense of this compound adjective is the new sense of forthcoming. That old word’s early definition as “soon to appear” has been largely eclipsed by upcoming, and a new meaning of forthcoming has emerged of “responsive, open, outgoing, cooperative,” even “a pleasure to do business with.” For some reason, that happy extension of forthcoming is losing favor under the vogue onslaught of forward-leaning.
Thus, the forthcoming (in the old sense) meaning of forthcoming (in the new sense) is “forward-leaning.” The fresh figure of speech racing through the lingo of the edge-cutting calls up the image of a runner straining ahead, the tilt of the body throwing weight forward to aid acceleration. That fine image will have its moment of popularity but contains the seed of its metaphoric destruction: if you lean forward far enough, you fall on your face.
You left out the most interesting question: why are people (and ideologies) leaning? And what happens if they lean too far; fall on their faces and their behinds respectively? And what about the left and right leaners? Do the former become Maoists and the latter paleoconservatives or just right-wing crazies. And why aren’t centrists leaning?
Herbert J. Gans
Department of Sociology
Columbia University
New York, New York
Franken-. The hottest combining form in populist suspicion of science was coined in a letter to the New York Times on June 2, 1992, from Paul Lewis, professor of English at Boston College.
Commenting on an op-ed column criticizing the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to exempt genetically engineered crops from caseby case review, Professor Lewis held, “Ever since Mary Shelley’s baron rolled his improved human flesh out of the lab, scientists have been bringing such good things to life.” After this reference to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who created the monster in Ms. Shelley’s 1818 novel, the academic letter writer shot a bolt of juice into the lifeless coinage dodge with “If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.”
And that’s what they did! “Genetic engineering” was not then a scary enough phrase. The science of making foods more productive or resistant to disease had noncontroversial roots in hybrid corn pioneered in 1923, but ethical concerns about cloning merged with worries about mad-cow disease and suited the promotion of “organic” foods. A frightening metaphor was needed, and the Franken- prefix did the trick.
A Boston Globe reporter wrote in 1992 that Frankenfood “summed up nicely the monstrous unnaturalness of such controversial new products as genetically enhanced tomatoes and chromosome-tinkered cows,” and quoted the delighted Lewis, today chairman of the English Department, saying: “It has a phonetic rhythm, it’s pithy and you can use the Franken- prefix on anything: Frankenfruit … Frankenair … Frankenwater. It’s a Frankenworld.”
Since then, biotechnophobes and other members of the antigenetic movement have denounced Frankenseeds, Frankenveggies, Frankenfish, Frankenpigs and Frankenchicken, lumping them together as fearsome Frankenscience. In the Chicago Tribune, David Greising wrote in 1999 of Frankenfarmers supported by Frankenfans arguing with Frankenprotesters about unfounded Frankenfears.
Frankly, there’s no telling when or how it will end. It has enhanced the sales of the metaphysical novel that Ms. Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, encouraged her to write, and has not harmed sales at “Frank ’n’ stein,” the fast-food chain whose hot dogs and beer I find delectably inorganic.
At the American Dialect Society, Laurence Horn says: “I was hoping somebody might have coined Frankensense by now. This would be sort of the opposite of common sense, maybe as a description of politicians’mo-tivations for a creatively stupid piece of legislation.”
But this play on frankincense, an aromatic gum resin used in religious ceremonies, has not caught on. “Alas,” says the dialectologist Horn, “all the Web site usages I can find for Frankensense seem to be unintended misspellings of the traditional Christmas gift. You can tell because there’s an equally orthographically challenged rendering of myrrh.”
If you enjoy Frank ’n’ Stein, let me recommend a few other eateries that may have escaped your notice.
There is Health’s Angels, a natural food restaurant for bikers; Howe’s Bayou, for kosher Cajun cuisine; and finally (one I am sorry to say may shortly go belly-up) Pieces of Ate, which specializes in used food.
Harvey Fried
New York, New York
Fulminations. The specialists are in open rebellion at the theft of their vocabularies. Egged on by sly agitation in this space to fulminate about raids by the general public on their fields’ linguistic larders, the specialists have at last found an outlet for their ire at the twisting of their favorite terms.
“I cannot resist the invitation to rail against the boneheaded misuse of organic,” fulminates Stephen Slatin, at the Department of Physiology and Biophysics of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. “It does not, or certainly should not, mean ‘vegetables grown without fertilizers’ or ‘fruit produced without pesticides.’ ”
Right on, says Richard Fireman of Chicago: “Organic used to mean ‘carbon based.’An ‘inorganic food’ would be an oxymoron”—prescriptive us-agists would insist on the more specific “contradiction in terms”—“unless someone knows a way to get nourishment from stones.”
Chemists think of an “organized body” as an animal or plant containing compounds derived from hydrocarbons; they call that kind of chemistry organic and bristle at the “unscientific” extension of meaning into food “grown without chemical additives or genetic manipulation.”
Geologists, too, excoriate lay writers with rocks in their heads. When I wrote that San Jose was the epicenter of the California computer industry’s power consumption, Julian Stone of Rumson, New Jersey, noted: “Epicenter is a scientific term referring to the point on the surface of the earth above the underground focus of an earthquake. Do you mean that the center of power consumption in California is underground?”
The geophysicist Joseph D. Sides adds, “Writers should be advised that epi- no more intensifies the meaning of center than does pen- intensify the meaning of ultimate.” (The prefix epi- most often means “on” or “over”; pen, not a prefix, is from the Latin pæne, “almost.”) Sides defines epicenter as “the point on the surface of the earth vertically above the center of an earthquake, the quake’s ‘hypocenter.’” It is also, he says, “the point on the earth’s surface vertically below the atmospheric detonation of a bomb, the ‘hypercenter’ of the explosion.” He finds “misuse of the offending term attributable to spurious erudition on the part of the writers combined with scientific illiteracy on the part of copy editors.”
Is your understanding of these terms growing exponentially? No! thunders a totality of mathematicians. “I’m vexed to hear some trend described as ‘growing exponentially’ when the writer means it is growing rapidly,” writes Maurice Fox of Arlington, Virginia. “Exponential growth is not necessarily rapid. The mathematical term merely describes something whose rate of growth is proportional to its size. My savings account grows exponentially but not rapidly.”
Geometric, or compound, growth can be fast or slow; if our economy grows by 0.1 percent a year, that’s exponential, but the stock market tanks. A professor of physics at Tufts University, Roger Tobin, is equally annoyed at the lay misuse of exponential to mean “a whole lot,” referring to quantity rather than rate of growth, “but to say my annoyance is exponentially greater today than yesterday is gibberish.”
Tobin is not offended, however, by a general use of quantum to mean “sudden,” provided we don’t use it to mean “huge”: “The crucial characteristic of a quantum jump isn’t its size but its abruptness—something goes from one state to another without passing through any intermediate states in between.” That’s one of the “stolen meanings” that started this specialist agitation, which is growing fast if not expone
ntially.
Those intellectuals who name their companion animals Peeve (to be able to say “This is my pet, Peeve”) have as their ally Jacques Barzun, America’s only best-selling nonagenarian. “A couple of misplaced technicalities,” he writes from San Antonio. “Synergy, which belongs to physiology and relates to the working together of muscles, etc. Applied to the merger of two clothing firms (actual), it is ridiculous, especially since technically the meaning is ‘greater effect than the sum of the efforts.’”
A semantic theft by educators is module, which Professor Barzun says “is used ambiguously to mean ‘a class period’ and ‘a portion of program.’ (Years ago, it was ‘nucleus.’) A module in architecture or building generally is a part that does not change size, character or function and thus serves as a measure of a larger whole. In a column, it is the measurement itself—half the diameter of the base.”
Architects, too, have their linguistic bêtes noires. (“Peeve, meet my bête, Noire.”) “I am very annoyed at the current usage of the term architect,” writes Fran Read, who is one. “Examples include ‘architect of the peace plan,’ ‘software architect’ and in the phrase spoken by several CEO’s and commentators on CNBC, ‘We rearchitected the software.’”
Read’s pique is superstructured by Tim Groninger, a project engineer. “Word thievery in engineering has become especially acute,” he seethes, “due to the ever-growing hunger for words in the world of computers. I can no longer use the word architecture in the traditional sense. The word now implies the design and construction of computer networks, not buildings.”
The architect Edwin Elias-Narvaez piles on with “It is particularly galling to perform an Internet search for architect only to find thousands of references having nothing to do with the traditional meaning of the word.”
(The magazine Architectural Record recently interviewed Richard Saul Wurman, who said: “I invented the term information architect in 1975, when I was national chairman of the AIA [American Institute of Archi-tects] convention in Philadelphia. It was called ‘The Architecture of Information.’ Now I would say that somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 people in the U.S. have information architect on their business cards.”)
Fulminations from other fields are still coming in. Ophthalmologists narrow their eyes at the nearsighted semantic theft of their myopic. Yoga practitioners in rooster position cock-a-doodle mellowly but firmly about the extension of guru from “revered teacher and spiritual leader” to a sarcastic “self-appointed cult figure.” And most of all, logicians everywhere pose the query, What are the philistines doing to our beg the question?
The specialists are not going to take it anymore.
Stephen Slatin, you report, “rail[s] against boneheaded misuse of ‘organic’ thus: ‘It does not, or certainly should not, mean “vegetables grown without fertilizers” or “fruit produced without pesticides.”’” Perhaps Mr. Slatin should see a phrenologist. On one point he is simply mistaken: organic does mean “grown without fertilizers” and “produced without pesticides.” Just ask your specialist in the produce section of your supermarket or their patrons. As to whether it “certainly should not” mean this, does Mr. Slatin mean an a priori certainty deducible from the deep structure of the language itself or an observational certainty based on universally accepted, peer-reviewed, reproducible results obtained under controlled conditions? Perhaps Mr. Slatin intends the conditional meaning of should as in it “certainly should not mean” this (were I to become the final arbiter of English usage). Or perhaps he means “certainly” only as an intensifier and not to mean irrefutable. I hate it when folks do that.
And why do physicists refer to the likeliest location of an electron in an atom as an orbital despite the obsolescence of the planetary model of the atom? They also refer to the elliptical paths of celestial bodies as “orbits.” Orbs are spheres. They’re round, you blockheads.
And why do doctors insist on perpetuating their arcane Greek and Latin anatomical nomenclature when universally understood and unambiguous substitutes are available? (Or one might say, “Why do doctors still use fancy words for parts of the body when simple ones would do as well?”) Is anterior superior to front? Is rear inferior to posterior? Does upper arm bone sound any funnier than humerus?
Barry Brown
Nashua, New Hampshire
Ballistic may well sound impressive but is totally wrong (just as a measure of distance—the light year—is wrongly used to describe a long period of time). Moving under the force of gravity only, thus an intercontinental ballistic missile is fired (under rocket power) into the heavens and when the rocket cuts out or whatever, it continues on its way where its course is determined by gravity and the momentum imparted by the prior rocket power. Thus an ICBM may well explode upon impact with its target (because it contains an explosive warhead) but to go ballistic is not to explode—it is to coast after an initial boost ceases. Similarly, as the bullet leaves the barrel of a gun the explosive force that propels the bullet has been exhausted and the trajectory is determined by gravity and the previously imparted momentum—the bullet is coasting—& this is why the ’60s TV cop shows I grew up with always had investigations by the “guys from ballistics.”
Malcolm Park
University of Melbourne
Melbourne, Australia
Your last column was turned into a soapbox for a bunch of language curmudgeons. It seems only fair that you give some equal box time to some looser linguistic thinkers.
Words get reused in different disciplines and words become trendy and overused, but neither of these things makes a word usage incorrect or inappropriate. If the curmudgeons had their way, every word would have a fixed definition and there would be no poetry. (For what is poetry but a play on words?) Where would our language be if it wasn’t allowed to move, stretch and dance? Oh wait, language cannot dance, dancing applies only to physical objects, right?
It is fair to criticize a true misuse (like penultimate or literally, both of which are misused all the time), but these people seem to have no love of language, only a bean counter’s love of organization and rules.
I suggest that these people just need to pull their collective noses out of their professional journals and pick up a good work of fiction or poetry. Or even a bad one for that matter—anything to get them out of their literal heads for a moment.
Ben Gold
New York, New York
I think one must include “periodically.” The term has come to be used to mean “occasionally” or “infrequently” when, in fact, it means “regularly,” regardless of what frequency is being described. An item, as I am sure I do not have to explain to you, is periodic if it occurs annually, monthly, weekly or each second. The period of a pendulum is the time it takes for it to complete a sweep of its arc, to and then fro. Periodicals arrive daily, semi-annually, et cetera. “Periodicity” refers to “frequency” in a number of scientific applications including chemistry, physics and, more specifically, electricity.
But of course, many folks use “periodically” in everyday speech to indicate that they do or experience something only once in a while. They may, in fact, experience it periodically-but likely not. Probably, they experience it occasionally, and at irregular intervals, and believe that suffices it to be periodic.
Mark Foggin
New York, New York
The chemists should talk! They themselves have hijacked the word “organic” which simply means, “of use, useful,” especially in reference to the body (obviously from the Greek organikos). But when science hijacks something, that’s called a definition.
John Hymers
Universiteit Leuven
Leuven, Belgium
I enjoyed your recent article on “penultimate” and its Latin origins. I was a little surprised that you didn’t use my favorite Latin example, peninsula (pæne, “almost” + insula, “island”).
My little rural Indian school in Indiana didn’t offer French, Spanish or German, but som
e of us took four years of Latin.
Jack E. Garrett
Monroe Township, New Jersey
Tim Groninger makes a classic error when he writes, “word thievery … has become especially acute,” suggesting that the problem has reached pandemic proportions. Acute, as in “acute appendicitis,” refers to suddenness of onset, not severity. We doctors note that word appropriation from medicine is a chronic condition.
Eric Flisser, MD
New York, New York
Your lead sentence should have read, “The specialists have been in open rebellion at the theft of their vocabularies.”
In his monumental American Language, Mencken, in Supplement One, cited the misappropriation of the word “engineer” by Engineering News Record, as follows: “The Engineering News-Record, the organ of the engineers, used to devote a column every week to uninvited invaders of the craft … One of its favorite exhibits was a bedding manufacturer who became the first mattress-engineer and then promoted himself to the lofty dignity of sleep-engineer. The hatching of bogus engineers still goes on.”
Displaying its sense of humor at the theft of its craft, Mencken offered this: The rat, cockroach and bedbug eradicators of the country had for years an organization called the American Society of Exterminating Engineers. On November 8, 1923, the News-Record reported that one of its members followed the sideline of mortician in Bristol, PA, and suggested sportively: “That’s service for you. Kill ’em and bury ’em for the same fee.”
EN-R’s umbrage is not quite on the target of your fulminators, but close enough.
Dick McQuillen
New York, New York
Is it okay with paleontologists if language evolves ?
Fred Rosenthal
Marblehead, Massachusetts