- Feb 5, 2002
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What is the most overused word in the English language at present? “Incredible.” Just count how many times it crops up in an evening’s TV viewing. It’s almost never used literally. “Incredible” literally means not to be believed, but when people say they work incredibly hard they’re not inviting you to disbelieve them. The English language is rich in superlatives — supreme, extraordinary, magnificent, exceptional, astonishing — but only three are in regular use: incredible, amazing and fantastic. The runaway success of “incredible” is currently being challenged by the clunky “impactful”. “Impact” moved centre stage fairly recently, ousting “effect”. Instead of asking if something is impactful you could just ask if it’s effective, rather as the bureaucratic phrase “on a daily basis” could be replaced by the simpler “every day”. But some gluttons for linguistic labour prefer four words where two would do.
A few years ago, the ground suddenly became the floor. For centuries the ground has been outdoors and the floor indoors, but now people fighting in the street are said to roll around on the floor. Armed police confronting a criminal in a park now shout “Get down on the floor!” when they mean the ground, to which a smart villain might reply “But there isn’t a floor around here!” You can find some fascinating plants in the woods if you look on the floor. You’re unlikely to find an existential crisis there, however. Existential crises are also a recent phenomenon, and involve a use of the word “existential” you won’t find in any dictionary. It doesn’t mean “imminent” or “severe”, it means “actually existing”. So an existential crisis is an actually existing one, which is the only kind of crisis you’re likely to come across. Non-existential crises are as rare as Trotskyist taxi drivers. If you want to impress your friends at dinner parties, you could say: “The morning star and the evening star are conceptually distinct but existentially identical”, meaning that the words mean different things but refer to the same actually existing object (the planet Venus). Or perhaps you should just say: “I had an incredibly impactful existential crisis on the Hyde Park floor.”
Some verbal innovations stick and some don’t. “Hopefully”, for example, doesn’t mean “It is to be hoped that”, which is what everyone uses it to mean; it means to do something while full of hope. But nobody is going to abandon the term just because a professor points this out, so what once would have been a misuse is now an acceptable usage. This is part of how languages work. The archaic word “anon” once meant “right away”, but given the human tendency to procrastinate it came to mean “soon” or “shortly”. For much the same reason, “I’ll be with you immediately” means the opposite of what it says, while “presently” once meant “right away” but now means “in a while”. “A mental health episode” also means the opposite of what it says. It’s just that people can’t bring themselves to talk about mental illness.
Continued below.
unherd.com
A few years ago, the ground suddenly became the floor. For centuries the ground has been outdoors and the floor indoors, but now people fighting in the street are said to roll around on the floor. Armed police confronting a criminal in a park now shout “Get down on the floor!” when they mean the ground, to which a smart villain might reply “But there isn’t a floor around here!” You can find some fascinating plants in the woods if you look on the floor. You’re unlikely to find an existential crisis there, however. Existential crises are also a recent phenomenon, and involve a use of the word “existential” you won’t find in any dictionary. It doesn’t mean “imminent” or “severe”, it means “actually existing”. So an existential crisis is an actually existing one, which is the only kind of crisis you’re likely to come across. Non-existential crises are as rare as Trotskyist taxi drivers. If you want to impress your friends at dinner parties, you could say: “The morning star and the evening star are conceptually distinct but existentially identical”, meaning that the words mean different things but refer to the same actually existing object (the planet Venus). Or perhaps you should just say: “I had an incredibly impactful existential crisis on the Hyde Park floor.”
Some verbal innovations stick and some don’t. “Hopefully”, for example, doesn’t mean “It is to be hoped that”, which is what everyone uses it to mean; it means to do something while full of hope. But nobody is going to abandon the term just because a professor points this out, so what once would have been a misuse is now an acceptable usage. This is part of how languages work. The archaic word “anon” once meant “right away”, but given the human tendency to procrastinate it came to mean “soon” or “shortly”. For much the same reason, “I’ll be with you immediately” means the opposite of what it says, while “presently” once meant “right away” but now means “in a while”. “A mental health episode” also means the opposite of what it says. It’s just that people can’t bring themselves to talk about mental illness.
Continued below.
The perversion of the English language
Pointing out linguistic abuses is a perilous business
unherd.com
