August 1st, 2008
“Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest: those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. …The greatest cause for verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative – useless synonyms for good or bad.”
Today’s lecture in semantics, inspured by Lewis, concerns the word patently. Patently means obviously, so obviously you should never say that something is “patently obvious”. Obviously obvious? Spare us!
Patently absurd is still acceptable.
Vex,
Be careful how much time you spend around that wordy rogue Lewis. You might be “Suprised by Joy” and (to borrow from another Inkling) that would be a real eucatastrophe.
~I.
“Patently obvious” is a perfectly cromulent use of two words.
But how about “very unique”!?
When my (now ex) wife asked me how she looked when dressing up for a party I said she looked nice (def: pleasing; agreeable; delightful). However, because of verbicide “nice” doesn’t cut it anymore, it seems. I might as well have told her she looked like a bag of shit for the reaction I got. Damn you verbicide!
English is a living language, and the definition of a word mutates over time. Essentially, a word means whatever the society that uses it wants it to mean.
e.g. “gay”, “geek”, “awesome”, and your husband’s personal favorites “phenomenal” and “fraught”.
The only problem with this is the tendency for language to change in the direction of lesser precision. When language changes so that words encompass more with less specificity, that’s a serious loss. It reflects ignorance of vocabulary, in my humble opinion.
Like dilemma. Formerly meant a forced choice between two equally problematic options – now it just means a big problem. There isn’t really any word to mean what dilemma used to mean, though that situation still exists. This is why I don’t like language creep. It makes us less able to express ourselves with precision. Which is, like, totally fraught.
Specificity of meaning is far more important in a written medium than it is in a spoken one. As a culture, we are moving more and more towards the latter, in which the meaning is driven more by the context than by the literal meaning of the word used.
I read once that 70% of communication is based on body language, 20% is based on tone of voice and intonation, and only 10% is based on the words themselves.
(Eddie Izzard has a great bit on how Kennedy got such a great reaction for saying “I am a jelly doughnut” based on this principal. It also explains how Robbie Williams can be so inexplicably popular for singing utter gibberish.)
Mass communication used to happen only through written mediums, so the precision of meaning was more important than it is in today’s society.
Hmm. I think you’re right in so far as what is actually happening with our language, but I still think it’s bad. Specificity is, I’d say, very important in spoken language.
This struck me recently as I have been watching a number of documentaries about previous decades, and even if you close your eyes (so you don’t see the outfits) you can basically guess within 10 years when the speech was made based on how good the language use is. In 1962, college freshmen could speak in complete, complex sentences without resorting to “like” or “um”. Nowadays most people sound like a bunch of halfwits.
I dunno. It’s not going to stop but it seems like a shame to have allowed much of the power and richness of our language to atrophy.