A man of letters on the power of words

Boston Globe

2 days ago

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When I was a boy playing some word game with my family, any altercations would be answered with a cry of 'Look it up in the dictionary!' There were two parts to this looking-up: the first related to the word's status, indeed existence. If a word wasn't in the dictionary, then it didn't, in any real sense, exist. 'Not in the dictionary!' was a triumphant result for an opponent. The second part was to do with meaning: A word meant what the dictionary said it meant, nothing more, nothing less.
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Adolescence, and the awareness of sex, made me realize that there were more words in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in the dictionary. I remember in idle moments looking up words and phrases I suspected had something to do with sex, also the new words and phrases boys used with a sense of thrilled discovery. That they 'weren't in the dictionary' and couldn't be employed in front of my parents made them, of course, all the more thrilling to use in private.
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But I still believed in the overall authority of the dictionary, and while not much given to philosophical reflection, I assumed two things about words, their life, and their history. The first was that words matched the world: that every word stood for a real something out there, and conversely, that everything out there in the world had its appropriate name, and that name, that word, was to be found in the dictionary. And the second thing I quasi-assumed was that at the moment when a thing was named — whether by Adam in the Garden of Eden or by some lexically advanced caveman — the word meant nothing other than the thing denoted by it. In other words, there was a golden age, a peaceable kingdom in which all the words lay down happily with one another, meaning no more and no less than they did, and each blissfully attached to its own single thing, idea, item, notion.
Put like this, it sounds a bit absurd — deliberately so. But it is, I think, the belief most of us start off having about words, and some continue on with: The notion that words have some fixed, original, authentic meaning, and that the only way to go thereafter is down. This lexical golden-ageism often joins hands with grammatical prescriptivism — never end a sentence with a preposition, never split an infinitive, and so on — to create many mournful and irritated letters to the newspapers about the decline of language and, with it, civilization. Once you can't trust a word to mean what it 'always has,' then the world starts to go to hell in a handbasket, as my mother used to say. Though that's an odd word for a start — 'handbasket.' And how might the world go to hell in one?
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I began to realize that there was something wrong with such linguistic absolutism when I got my first job after university, as an editorial assistant on a new supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. I spent three years researching the history of certain words and phrases between B and G, trying to find their earliest printed use, writing etymologies, pronunciations, and definitions. It was very particular, microscopic work — I remember spending days reading through books on cricket, trying to find the earliest printed use of the word 'gully' — but those three years changed most of my previous assumptions about words and dictionaries.
If I went in as an unthinking conservative prescriptivist, I came out a liberal descriptivist. I no longer believed in some golden age of language, some platonic matching of word and thing. Nor did I accept the myth of linguistic decline — that once upon a time language was employed by people who always knew their wrist from their elbow, until the barbarians came through the gates bringing misuse, inaccuracy, vulgarization. I came to believe instead that language was — and is — often approximate, that words mean only what we generally agree that they mean, and that the English language has always been in a state of tumultuous motion, and all the better for it.
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Let me give an example. When the Welsh Labour politician Ray Gunter resigned from Parliament in 1972, he made an emotional speech in which he said he was going back to the valleys 'from whence I have come.' There was a certain amount of mockery — posh mockery — of Gunter for this remark. Ho ho, he doesn't know that 'whence' means 'from where,' so 'from whence' is like saying 'from from where,' good riddance to this linguistic oaf. But — look it up in the dictionary — 'from whence' is well attested in both Shakespeare and the Bible. (Gunter was doubtless referencing Psalm 121: 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.') Grammarians who try to impose grammar on a moving language, to force it backward into some false original purity of structure, are always on to a loser. Still, at least — and this is not something I say very often — at least we are not French. For centuries the French had — and still have — the Académie Française sitting in judgment on what is truly and authentically a French word and finding 'proper' alternatives for unacceptable neologisms and imports, like 'le weekend.'
The English language is — has always been — a mongrel beast. That is partly where its vigor, energy, and suppleness come from. Its porosity to the languages and dialects of other English-speaking countries acts as a regular blood transfusion. Any writer born into the English language is very lucky: not just for all the many potential readers out there, but for the very words he or she is given to play — to play seriously — with.
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Of course, being a liberal relativist about words doesn't mean that I think anyone can use the language — written or spoken — as well as anyone else. The war against cliché is ongoing — even if, as I write it, that phrase, 'the war against cliché,' sounds, well, a bit of a cliché. Obviously, some writers are better than others — in clarity, style, expressiveness, effect. Obviously, a writer shouldn't needlessly confuse a reader, only needfully — for a specific and well-understood purpose. Obviously, the bad linguistic guys are still out there — seeking our vote, trying to sell us a product, lying to us about what happened, by bad or misleading use of language. And yet I believe that in the end good language drives out bad, and that the obfuscators will be defeated, partly by the very strength of language itself.
At the same time, just as I celebrate the endless malleability of the language I use to write in, there are changes I don't like. Within the tolerant former lexicographer lies the grumpy older citizen. To enumerate a few of my particular beefs: I hate the way 'storied' is beginning to replace 'historic' and 'paraphrase' is used instead of 'adapt'; or 'fulsome' (which 'means' 'falsely over the top') is used to mean 'very full.' 'Beg the question' has long been a losing cause; it 'means' 'avoid the question by prejudging the answer' but — perhaps because 'beg' has some possible ambiguity to it — has come to mean 'ask the question.' I want British English to remain distinct from American English. I dislike the creeping use of 'out the door/window' (American) rather than 'out of the door/window.' Similarly, in sports commentary, American terms like 'an assist' or 'step up to the plate' are often now used, to no wiser purpose that I can see. And when someone a generation or two below me says 'I like that you're here' instead of 'I'm glad that you're here' or 'I like the fact that you're here,' I tend to bridle. The construction — from German via American English — sounds wrong and harsh to my ear. And I have a visceral dislike of what has happened to the lovely word 'uxorious.' It used to describe a man who doted irredeemably on his wife; now it is applied to a man who has simply had a number of wives. I wouldn't call that uxoriousness, rather — at best — sentimental recidivism.
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Or take that lovely, precise old verb 'to decimate.' From the Latin 'decimare,' meaning to remove one-tenth. As used of military punishments. When a Roman legion famously — or, should we say, infamously? — fought badly or behaved treasonably, the survivors were lined up and one in 10 of them was killed. It was a terrible punishment but also a very precise one. Then slippage of meaning began, and nowadays the word is used as a synonym of massacre, wipe out, obliterate: in other words, kill more like nine out of 10. I know very good writers, even professors of English, who misuse this term. You could say that they have decimated its meaning. Everyone seems out of step on this except me and a handful of Latin scholars. And every time I see it used in this corrupt sense I feel what Evelyn Waugh once described as 'the senile itch to write letters to the newspapers.'
But if I were to use the word in its original, true sense, few would understand me. So the word has gone — or rather, its previous meaning has gone. As a writer, I acknowledge this without celebrating it; as a grumpy citizen, I repine. But as a former lexicographer, I look up the word's history in the OED and realize that this slippage of meaning, which I imagine to be of recent date, was in fact well underway during the 19th century.
Language is tidal, oceanic, and the individual standing up with a placard of protest is inevitably washed away by a veritable tsunami ... hmm — 'tsunami.' Now, don't get me started on that.