I heard a new word the other day on a news show. “Catastrophizing”. I guess it truly is a word, because spell check on my computer didn’t put that little squiggly red line under it. Does it mean “make into a catastrophe”? How does one do that? Is it like a skier that starts an avalanche? He or she “catastrophized” an existing natural phenomenon? All right. I bow to greater minds than mine.
This revelation, then, is all about the manipulation of language. Folks on television do that all the time. Even newspaper writers. There was mention in a recent frontpage article about a parochial school in the area reaching “the century mark.” It turns out they’d been in school for 100 days. Is that a century? I thought century meant 100 years. What happened? Perhaps, I could put exactly 100 potato chips in a bag and name it “Century Chips”. Sportscasters use the term regularly when, for example, a baseball player gets to 100 hits, or 100 times on base. Darned good for an old person. Similarly, a “decade” used to refer to ten years. Now, in broadcasting, it’s anything related to ten. A football team up by ten points at half time is “ahead by a decade.” Wow, long game. Back in the pre-Amazon days, anything ordered on line would come in 5-10 business days. Can you imagine a retailer notifying a customer that their parcel would arrive “in a decade”?
In the interests of language merriment, I’m going to invent my own word. “Verbify”. English teachers – please take note of this recent development. It means “creating a verb where one previously did not exist. Any time this happens, it’s a process that I call “verbification”. A friend of my parents, an English professor, used to rail against adding “ize” to any noun, making it into a verb, or verbification. For example, he’d say “if alphabet can become alphabetize”, then the next logical step would be to ‘rubber-bandize’, the process by which one places a rubber band around something. Voila – we’ve now added to the language and verbified.
One sportscaster that I really like because he’s amusing, talks about pitchers (and he was one) “throwing cheese”. I think, but I’m not absolutely sure as I’m not an expert, that it’s a good thing. The pitches are either fast, hard, or not likely to be hit. Carrying on the analogy, we could create subcategories of pitches. “Wow – that was a sharp cheddar. Right down the middle.” Or, “A bit of a camembert there – smelly, crumbly, and way outside the strike zone.”
An ad for a depression medication refers to someone being “listless and disinterested”. I don’t think that’s what the ad agency means. A judge is “disinterested”, without bias or prejudice. A depression sufferer is “uninterested”, lacking engagement. Classic case of two similar words being confused. Often too, a word takes on new meanings, unrelated to their prior use. We had an elderly relative that frequently in conversation used “queer” to mean something odd or peculiar. My mother used “horny” to refer to long, uncut toenails. It was usually a reprimand when holes started appearing in socks. We’d patiently explain that it meant something else entirely, and she really shouldn’t use it at all out in polite company. Remember when “cool” meant slightly chilly? “Hip” was a body part. My sister, at a very young age, mind you, would refer to her older brothers teasing her about something, as “so premature”. Close, but not quite.
Language transformation has been a part of our development for quite some time. We are seldom alarmed to hear of something “cannibalized”, as in typical usage, it means car parts or a refrigerator door rather than the Donner Party. Similarly, an “accent” referred to the way someone spoke. President Jimmy Carter once joked, upon his election, that “it was nice to have a president without an accent.” Of course, we musicians always knew that an accent was a note that jumped out from the others. Now, we have pillows, kitchen cannisters, front doors, and even whole walls that are “accents”. As I’m writing this, I gaze down at an ad for chicken tenders, with the legend, “They look ferocious, but . . . . .” Really? Chicken tenders? Ferocious isn’t really the term I’d use. They look pretty much like what they are – bits of chicken with a crispy covering. Not so much “Game of Thrones”.
So many of our new terms and descriptions come from specialized areas, particularly advertisers, designers, scientists, and the pharmaceutical industry. Why, those folks are making up language at a truly alarming rate. Every day, there’s a new skin condition, joint pain, or an internal organ about to shut down, but fortunately, there’s a new treatment. “Ask your doctor about Piklomarassyn.” (Yes, I made that up. It’s the noun form of “piklomarassize”.) While I’m not completely sure, I will speculate that most of what the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industries were coming up with were totally unpronounceable, so they put the ad people to work.
Designers too have contributed their bit to language. “Organic”, for example, can refer to all manner of materials, colors, and design elements. In truth, housing hasn’t really been “organic” since mud huts in the Middle Ages. I can hear Henry VIII directing the architects of Hampton Court to make it look “organic”. “Curb appeal” came about because “looks nice from the street” just didn’t cut it. If you’ve read any of my extensive dissertations – that’s good word too that I’ve repurposed here – on House Hunters, you’ll know that many clients will talk about “craftsman” when, in fact, it’s quite clear that they wouldn’t know a ‘craftsman ’ from a green house. The tech folks have given us the terms “hardware” and “software.” To clarify for my readers, anything that you can throw out the window in frustration is usually “hardware”.
Speaking of “repurposing”, we’ve done a lot of that lately in the era of pandemic. Closing, opening, and reopening used to mean doors, windows, and closets. Now, it’s the economy. “Masking” was pretty much the province of burglars and bank robbers. Now, it’s everyone. There are other examples too. Stimulus used to mean a shot of adrenalin, sitting on a large tack, or getting up off the couch and going for a walk. Now it’s a nice check sent directly into my bank account. Thank you very much. Recover was a term for applying new upholstery to a chair. Now, it’s a wonderful, utilitarian term for social interaction, the economy getting better, or getting over an illness.
Probably the greatest language innovation of the 21st century is inspired by technology. The use of letters rather than whole words makes communication so much faster and more efficient. FMFR (for my faithful readers), I call it “thumb language”, because one sees it most often used by people texting with thumbs only on their cellphones. In full disclosure, I can’t do it with my thumbs, so I used Mr. Pointer, who frequently hits the wrong letter, whereby “autocorrect” leaps into action, fixing what it thought I intended, and changing the meaning of my message entirely. What a wonderful prefix, “auto”. It can refer to car brakes bring us to a screeching halt on a dime, or now can take the worry out of parallel parking in small spaces. Planes, of course, have had “autopilot” for years, leaving human pilots free to . . . . . I don’t want to think about it. Back to letters, though, I don’t use them much myself because there’s lots of opportunity to indicate something totally unintended. (You can refer back to my mother’s inappropriate use of term above.) There was a whole category of these communication shortcuts on Jeopardy the other night. I’m truly amazed, as I didn’t know most of them. OMG! It goes to show that, the more language expands, the more we need to abbreviate it to save time, or as I like to say, “minify”.
Must go now, as the weather is warming up and I’m back to my gardening magazines. I’m planning to shrubicize out front, and then do some perennializing before I mulchify.
I'm Thinking...No! 