Speaking of Words
By Michael Ferber
I have tried in these columns to describe or explain features of English and other languages that strike me as interesting, and not to prescribe “correct” uses or vent my pet peeves. Most linguists take even the weirdest departures from normal usage in their stride, and decline to pass judgment on them. New words and phrases, or new uses of old ones, are grist for their academic mill, and it is not in their job description to object to them.
Take the word awesome. Before about 1980 its main sense was “awe-inspiring,” “wondrous,” or “sublime.” Today its main sense is “good” or “fine” or “nice.” I think I mentioned in an earlier column the time, back in 1988, before I had heard much of the Valley Girls’ dialect of English, when I was walking my adorable golden retriever puppy across the UNH campus, I was stopped three times by students who said, What an awesome puppy! (A fourth said, What a wicked awesome puppy! but that’s another topic.) It had never occurred to me that a puppy could be awesome.
Awesome was once a synonym of awful. Well into the twentieth century we might speak of the awful majesty of the law or of awful beauty, something that inspires awe or reverence. Now awful means “bad,” the antonym of awesome.
It is natural to deplore these changes. It is surely too bad to lose the original meaning of both these words and be left with awe-inspiring, an awkward compound, to convey something truly stirring and even soul-shaking, but it is normal in most languages to over-use extreme terms until they melt into mediocrity, like great or wonderful, which now can mean merely “okay.” Terrific and terrible were once synonyms, more or less, like awesome and awful, but constant exaggeration have made them opposites, and both of them are now bland. We may not welcome this sort of change, but there is no use complaining about it. We can put a finger in the dike, but the dike is leaky and fairly low.
Another recent development, well tracked by linguists since the 1980s, is like as a verb of quotation, or perhaps approximate quotation. He was like “I won’t do it,” and I was like “You’ve got to.” This use may have been a shortening of He was saying something like, but like quickly changed from adjective to verb. It is often used in the present tense to refer to the past, as we saw in the New Yorker cartoon some years ago, where Ophelia speaks an aside to the audience: “He’s like ‘To be or not to be,’ and I’m like ‘Get a life.’”
Linguists tell us that it is hopeless to resist new slang, no matter how repulsive or illogical it may seem to us. Irregardless is here to stay, along with awesome and like. But a brief look at lists of former slang gives us hope that resistance may sometimes succeed after all. Suggestionize was a verb current in the 1890s in England, but it seems to have been promptly hooted off the stage. Marvy arose in America in the 1930s and lingered a while, but it now sounds silly or deliberately retro. Retro, in fact, though still current in the realm of fashion or style, has been around only since the 1970s and may some day sound retro too.
If we pick our battles, then, we might win a few. We might at least make it more difficult for irritating new words and phrases to depart the spoken realm where they usually arise and enter printed or digitized texts. (I realize I have just discussed suggestionize and marvy in a respectable on-line journal, so I may have set us back a bit. Sorry.)
Encouraged by some past successes, then, let me nominate a few phrases for extinction. Politicians are telling us that they are laser-focused on the economy or national security. Get rid of the worn-out laser, I say; it doesn’t help. And do we really want our elected officials to be so narrowly focused on one thing only? Another abused scientific phrase is quantum leap. We may be tempted to say, Corruption in the Presidency, while not new, has taken a quantum leap under Trump, but the claim is stronger without quantum. In physics, after all, a quantum leap is the smallest possible leap. We might coin a new word here, qualum, since the leap in corruption is qualitative, not only quantitative.
So let’s get rid of these silly adjectives. Another candidate for the memory hole is the phrase one of the only. We see it everywhere, even in respectable circles. “New York City is one of the only cities that made the list that wasn’t in the West or the South” (from USA Today). “Sydney is one of the only places in the world Starbucks failed” (Condé Nast Traveler). The phrase is both lazy and self-contradictory and has no right to exist.
And here is more advice for politicians. Don’t say Let me be clear or, even worse, Let me be perfectly clear. We expect you to be clear. It is your duty to be clear. To ask permission to be clear is to confess that sometimes you are not, in which case your duty is to shut up. And don’t say Look before every explanation. Don’t say it at all. It’s a habit acquired by people who feel important and expect other people to defer to them. It’s a command, and a bit of bullying. Don’t say Listen either, for the same reason.
There. I feel better now, though some linguists will snort. If readers will send me their pet peeves, I will mention some of them in a future column. We can vent our spleen together. But it will be one of the only times I do so, because look: I am normally laser-focused on simply describing the awesome language we speak.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions, comments, or pet peeves: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.