Not a million miles from New Jersey, another family is in crisis over ‘impact’ used as a verb. If only people would accept that the best way to settle these questions is to yell at one another.
For that, wrapped up in some fancy ribbon, is pretty much what prescriptivists and descriptivists do.
P: ‘Impact’ is not a verb.
D: It is now. It’s in the dictionary.
P: So what? ‘Eftsoons’ is in the dictionary.
D: ?
D-people believe that language just changes – the word ‘spontaneous’ comes in here – and we must keep up. According to D-people, reference books should just include whatever’s out there. David Foster Wallace points out that, on this principle, a book about electricity would need to include the theory that electricity flows downhill.
P-people point out that it’s people who change language, and that change can be for the worse.
At this point, D-people often make for higher ground. All distinctions between ‘worse’ and ‘better’ they say will turn out to be functions of class, gender and race (CGR). This move is designed to make P-people feel vaguely immoral for having raised the issue.
Language change is not neutral, say prescriptivists, and there is an intelligible sense in which we can call a given instance of it ‘good’ or ‘bad’ according to criteria not reducible to CGR. Myself I’m against ‘impact’ as a verb because I’m persuaded that the reasons for the dropping of ‘affect’ are bad ones, and the consequences of the change deleterious. ‘Impact’ was adopted because (a) people of a younger generation couldn’t manage the distinctions between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ and (b) its use in advertising copy and headlines had implanted the idea that ‘impact’ was ‘punchier’, ‘more vivid’, above all more dramatic. You want to make an impact? Use ‘impact’.
You don’t believe me? Then what did occur? There’s always room for disagreement and debate here. What we can’t do is treat language change as something like the tides. People make change happen. I’m arguing here that the reasons for this particular shift are bad reasons and that their consequences are bad. By ‘bad’ I mean bad for language, hence for thought.
1. We should not not work around or tolerate plain error. We should correct it. (Yes, yes, I’ll talk about ‘we’ in a bit.) The differences between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ are not complicated, but they do require you to pay attention and to make an effort, and two generations of us have been taught not to bother their heads about such ‘trivia’ but to express themselves. In allowing error to flourish and to govern usage we endorse the view that language itself is trivial.
2. Every shift towards the more intense, from boring old ‘affect’ to exciting new ‘impact’, is self-defeating: words harnessed to everyday loads soon begin to plod. The result is the loss of a resource. “He made an impact on the crowd” now means damn-all – not that it ever meant much.
OK. Who we? Editors, journalists, writers, teachers, broadcasters, scholars – all those whose business is words and whose training has (we hope) equipped them to think carefully about language, given them some knowledge of its history and of the relationships between language and values. ( Orwell’s famous ‘Politics and the English Language’ is one such document; the work of the CGR scholars comes in here.) The community of intelligent people who actually use language in ambitious ways should not allow itself to be bullied by academic lexicographers with their heads in the 1960s.
Do we really want a society in which opinions on a matter of consequence are all equally ‘valid’? Despite the cant, we don’t: you don’t tell your doctor when to operate. I am not competent to judge a flower show or a dog show, to pick out promising recruits for baseball teams or to decide between rival scientific proposals. In all the domains about which we actually care, there is a hierarchy of opinion. Why should language be the exception – unless of course we don’t care about it?
I haven’t even mentioned here the question of which English can be considered standard. David Foster Wallace discusses this issue in his brilliant essay ‘Authority and American Usage’ (reprinted in Considering the Lobster). Is Black English ‘wrong’? No. Should it be the medium of instruction at university? No again. He has a nifty set of arguments against methodological descriptivism, a position he describes as ‘a barrel of drugged trout’. I tried to exemplify the essay, but DFW’s prose has a long wavelength, and his arguments are too exact (and funny) to chop up. Get hold of it. It might save your family.