Number 67
Someone thoughtfully left a lot of old Writer and Writer's Digest magazines in the laundromat (laundramat? laundrymat? ~ "Laundromat" wants to capitalize itself in Word, must be a trademark) and I helped myself to a few. The June 1986 issue of Writer's Digest is called "The Word Lover's Guide to How Words Work" in which columnist James J. Kilpatrick entered "Of the Making of Words There Shall Be No End." This title, first of all, is a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 12:12, "And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books [there is] no end; and much study [is] a weariness of the flesh." No kidding. Let's all stand up and stretch.
Kilpatrick wrote about neologisms, some of which have survived and thrived since 1986: bottom line; -ize words (I'm sorry to say) like incentivize, marginalize, finalize, conceptualize, and privatize; downsize (I'm even sorrier to say); to obsess over; workaholic and other holics; waitperson and other persons. Incentivize is the only one of these that MS Word highlights as possibly misspelled. Incent is an ugly back formation of incentivize, by the way, which should itself have been let go in favor of "give incentive to" or something like that.
Kilpatrick also mentioned "gift" as a verb, which I was sure was a recent annoying usage while Fred insisted it's not. Turns out he's right, he looked it up. It's been used as an intransitive verb at least since 1550. I still won't use it, though. Somehow I've been imprinted with a bias against it and think that the verb "give" serves the purpose.
Fortunately, "funeralize" has disappeared since 1986, and "focalize" (as in "focalize attention") faded. I hope the person who advertised "Term papers typed, edited, accurated. Reasonable." has gone out of business.
In the same issue, novelist John Sladek wrote "Futuring the Parameters of Speakstuff." His title embodies the three future trends he saw in the English language:
On a motel marquee: "Pleasurable and gratifying rooms, $148 a week." It's an ordinary chain motel off an interstate exit. I wonder if the local authorities are looking into it. Anyway, the sign was posted, letter by letter, either by someone with a sense of humor, or else by a manager whose native tongue is not English, which proves the danger of relying on a dictionary or thesaurus or on any brief definition of a word. The nuances, the connotations, the customary usages can make all the difference.
www.yourdictionary.com gives both "agreeable" and "gratifying" as synonyms for "pleasurable," and www.yourdict.org goes further and offers examples of usage, and both do the same for "gratifying." But neither makes it clear to the innocent reader that "pleasurable" isn't exactly the same as "pleasant" and "gratifying" isn't the same as "comfortable" or whatever satisfaction the writer wished to convey. You may expect to find a motel room pleasant and agreeable. You may expect to have your basic inn requirements fulfilled for $148 a week. While the words aren't exactly wrong, they are suggestive of something more than clean sheets and tiny bars of soap. I'd be expecting at least a back rub.
As Mark Twain explained, "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter ~ it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
News and documentary writers often want to do more than just give you the news, they want to grab your attention, they want to be cute and witty, they want to entertain. This has led to the use of word play where it's not needed and it's not cute or witty ~ quite the reverse. They can't seem to help themselves. For example, headlines about Martha Stewart's trial almost always seem to refer to her domestic tips on cooking, cleaning, or curtain making: "Cooked" was one of them. A TV documentary on cojoined (Siamese) twins was titled "Dying To Be Apart."
In my first professional editing/writing job, my editor wrote the titles for my stories, and she was in love with puns. She called a story about bees, "Taking the Sting Out of Bee Research." There was no sting involved. The experiment had nothing to do with stinging, or even with the difficulties of researching bees (although surprisingly, it was a controversial study).
I don't object to puns, but they're only good when they're good ~ not when they're too obvious or trite ("Cooked") or when they have nothing to do with the story ("Sting") or when they're just creepy ("Dying"). Just because a word has a double meaning, that doesn't make it witty.
A couple of advertisements refer to "very exclusive wall tiles" and "hair loss issues."
"Exclusive," of course, sometimes is used to mean pricey, as in "an exclusive restaurant" that may exclude those people who can't pay for it. It's a stretch to apply the word to a product just because the meaning is dissolving into a vague word-association riff. How can a tile be exclusive?
A person who's losing his or her hair may have personal "issues" related to encroaching baldness, but it should be enough to say a product deals with hair loss. It's too much to expect that something that makes your hair grow or maybe just look thicker should also be able to take the place of a psychologist or a spiritual counselor or a good buddy.
Following last week's comments on The Feel-Good Curriculum, a reader referred me to an amusing column by one Fred Reed (NOT to be confused with my Fred) on education. Some time ago another reader had referred me to another Fred Reed column, this one on English, from another site. The former reader hastened to warn me of Reed's misogyny, and I'm sure I'd find it if I read more of his stuff. But he writes well and these two columns are worth the time.
"Don't believe everything you think."
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