Language is organic. Like a living thing, it grows new bits,
and watches — sometimes with dismay — as old bits atrophy and eventually drop
off, or turn out to be adaptable to some new use. When Doctor Johnson found St
Paul’s Cathedral ‘Amusing and awful’ he didn’t mean what we should now mean,
but that it was amazing and awe-inspiring; ‘Ossum’ as young people now say.
(Yes, they still do; I checked recently with a highly street-wise nephew.)
I am told this or something like it very firmly whenever I have
the temerity to complain about the latest ‘incorrect’ (as I still sometimes
want to call it) use of a word. Majority usage is now the only criterion of
meaning, so if most people now use ‘Literally’ to mean something like ‘Very’,
then that is what it now means. (That one has now made the OED.) When I
complain, people assume I want English to become a dead language, available
only in ancient texts or inscribed on stone tablets. I don’t of course; I just
want to draw attention to what is happening and to say that something — usually
precision — has been lost. The engine of linguistic change is always, always,
ignorance, and if anyone can find a counter-example I shall be interested to
hear of it. What typically happens is that a journalist, wishing to sound
clever, gets hold of an impressive sounding word — ‘Exponentially’, let us say,
and not knowing much maths, decides it means something like ‘Very’ or ‘Rapidly’
and starts using it like that. Pretty soon others start using it like that, it
gets into the dictionaries, and another good, precise word is lost.
For convenience, to avoid tiresome circumlocutions, I shall
in what follows use ‘Correct’ and its cognates to refer to what words used to
mean, and ‘Incorrect’ to what they now mean. My example is the word ‘Crisis’:
correctly, a crisis is a turning point: some process continues to a point at
which it is unsustainable, and then there is a sudden change. Illnesses are
said (at least by doctors) to reach their crisis; the fever or whatever rises
to a critical point, and then the patient either dies or starts to get better.
The stalling of an aeroplane is a clear example: the controls, set too high,
make the aeroplane rise ever more steeply until something has to give, and it
suddenly dives; one sees it in geography in the form of an escarpment, where
one ascends an ever-steeper slope and then, at the top, finds a cliff.
But in recent usage, ‘Crisis’ simply means something like ‘Regrettable
state of affairs’, and crises are said to be ‘continuing’ or even (God help
us) ‘ongoing’. This is incorrect. What is now happening in Ukrania[1]
can correctly be called a crisis. What has been happening for some years now in
Greece is incorrectly called a crisis. So another good word is, right now,
being lost. Those of us who want to be precise in our speech and writing will
have to abandon ‘Crisis’ as a lost cause, and find some new word or expression.
We shall; language is living and growing.
[1]
Microsoft Word’s limited vocabulary does not contain ‘Ukrania’, which is what
those who live there call the place. ‘The Ukraine’, as it is often called,
actually means in Russian ‘The border area’. By using this expression one
perhaps unwittingly allies oneself with the Russian separatists.
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