A copper from western Sydney, talking on the ABC about the people who torched a church hall there over the weekend said the suspect was in the nature of a young person.
What kind of press protocols would goad a man to say that? Or was this scrupulous? It looks like the kind of dumb thing young people do, but it could be someone older.
I’m all for what is often described as ‘spontaneous language change’: who wants to be a pedant, or an elitist or one of those people who want to contaminate education with correctness? I just don’t think its advocates should stress the ‘spontaneous’ thing. Reviewing some recent changes in the language I thought I saw a pattern.
Some familiar changes first. The punchy, ‘impact on’ has routed the wimpy ‘affect’. ‘Disinterested’ moulders in its grave. We no longer speak about issues; we speak ‘around’ them.
The Zeitgeist whispers in our ears, Why have two words when one will do?
So for example ”reluctant’ is fast replacing ‘reticent’.
Mr Howard was reticent to admit that his government ignored climate change until there was a vote in it
Plain old ‘reluctant’ might imply that Mr Howard wasn’t altogether proud of his policy delay, whereas ‘reticent’, a much nicer word, implies only the reserve of a strong, disciplined leader.
Every politician is enjoying the new meaning of ‘refute’ which is soon to replace ‘reject’. (It has reached the ABC, and there multiplied like the cane toad.) Whereas once Mr Howard might have ‘rejected’ the charge of delay, he can now with propriety ‘refute’ it. Notice the gain: no actual arguments need to be made! The word carries the reassurance that somewhere behind the linguistic scenery some hard logical thinking has taken place.
I’m not sure yet about ‘mitigate’. Its main role is to replace the crassly quantitative ‘reduce’ as in ‘mitigate the risk of global warming’. The advantage there is the implication that something pretty deep is going on, maybe even an ‘emissions mitigation process’ so who’s counting? But ‘mitigate’ is also displacing ‘militate’ as in ‘mitigate against’. On the new principle that we need only one word per concept (and only one concept) the mitigate lobby needs to pick its target.
Are these changes spontaneous, organic, creative etc? Each originates in a simple confusion and terminates in a new meaning which then becomes a driver of social change. School kids can now absorb the following rules.
Nobody is ‘disinterested’; everyone is in it for a buck, and the very idea of impartiality is boring.
Nobody in power is reluctant to do anything; they just don’t want to boast.
If someone attacks your beliefs it is enough to say, ‘I refute your arguments’. (Said three times facing east this phrase eliminates whole ideologies.)
You can ‘mitigate’ pretty well anything.
Best of all, there is no longer any need to stick to a topic. So long as what you say is somewhere in the vicinity, you’re fine. I might even claim that this entry is around issues of intellectual (and hence social) decay. And how could anyone refute that?
Simon Clews, director of the Writing Centre at the University of Melbourne, Age January 5th:
And just as Coupland’s novels always seem to reflect and even define the era in which they are written, Coupland himself embraces all the possibilities of the times he lives in . . .
Sorry, Simon’s course in Advanced Hyperbole is full. Try again next era.
Corny rhythm track.
More than time to put ‘fierce’ to rest, unless it means fierce as in tiger. Within three pages of Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise we hear about Janacek’s ‘fierce work ethic’ and Bartok’s ‘fierce technique’. Snow Falling on Cedars is “fiercely intelligent” according to The Times.
A technique for Bartok might be called fierce, and writers can turn nasty if not properly fed. But ‘fiercely intelligent’ usually means nothing more than ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ intelligent. In a levelling age, reviewers mustn’t be caught praising mere intelligence or judging its degrees.
We still need ‘fiercely independent’ however to describe a person who is brave and proud as well as vehement. (All three possibilities are in SOED.)