Trash words and garbage grammar

Neologisms and other changes are part of the way language evolves. But when such changes reduce your power of expression, your ability to communicate nuance, they should not be considered inevitable but should instead be resisted as linguistic rubbish.

There are three types of such waste that I’ve identified: trash words, garbage grammar, and hijacked slang.

Trash words

The monarch of trash words is “impact,” which reduces effect, affect, impression, influence, and more into one cartoonish, caveman word. Impact doesn’t just shrink the speaker’s option for nouns. Thanks to an amalgam of ignorance and pretension, we have “impactful” instead of important or influential. We have impacting, impactfulization, and even — as God is my witness– “impactfulizationality.” (OK, I made that last one up. But for just a moment you thought it was real.)

A metropolitan weekly quoted a source as saying, “It is very impacting on your emotional health, your state of mind, when you can’t even leave your boat for fear that it’s going to be taken and crushed.” A recent story on extreme weather included the following statement. “(T)he temperatures are expected to be more intense and impactful…” In most cases, “impact” is not incomprehensible, it’s just less useful than the words it replaces. In this case, there is literally no telling what the word was supposed to mean.

Other examples of trash words include using “blog” for “post,” the equivalent of conflating library and book or restaurant and meal. Saying, “We should write a blog about that” is like saying “I watched a movie theatre about World War II.” Others include “weather event” instead of storm, “ask” instead of request, and “superfood,” a term concocted by the United Fruit company to sell bananas, for any number of phrases, such as “healthy food” or “food.”

To increase vocabulary is to work for the ability to understand the world in a deeper fashion. Uncritically accepting trash words contributes to the creation of a language that does not describe reality, something out of Orwell’s 1984, or out of the last presidential administration.

Garbage grammar

One of the articles of faith for the growing hordes of the extreme right is the destruction of language as an initiation into the gang. Examples include “Democrat party,” instead of Democratic party, “Stop the Steal,” instead of stop the theft, and “China virus,” instead of Covid-19.

This group’s dedication to wrongness reminds me of nothing so much as the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) in CS Lewis’s novel “That Hideous Strength.”

This garbage grammar is a parallel trend to trash words, driven by neo-fascists and their collaborators, but also by uncritical press that is too quick to coin terms, such as “Asian hate,” the opposite of the intended anti-Asian hate and “shelter in place,” a term that is used for an active shooter situation, for quarantine.

Business communications are a common font of garbage grammar. The latest was one directed at an acquaintance, and which read, “We have not solutioned yet.” It means, obviously, nothing.

To secure widespread usage, garbage grammar, regardless of type, relies on uncritical acceptance. And that’s an epic fail.

Hijacked slang

My homie is on fleek, bae! — Curt Hopkins

Throughout the long history of white people stealing black slang, a black idiom has rarely sounded hep in a white voice. Instead, it comes off as a kind of linguistic theft, a “stolen glory” attempt to shoplift the power of the original language, power that derives from the language’s environment.

But as fake and presumptuous as the intranational theft of slang may sound, it arguably sounds even stupider when people steal the idioms of another country. It has become embarrassingly common, for instance, for Americans to use English slang.

Again, such linguistic larceny is powered by the desire for others to mistake an affectation for style. The obviousness makes the user seem oblivious. When it comes to the theft of British slang, that desire is one of seeming exotic and sophisticated.

But in America, there are no “gingers,” a term with connotations of alienness. We have “redheads,” a word that connotes fieriness.

No one gets “jabs,” they get “shots.” There are no “lifts,” “bonnets,” or “lorries,” there are “elevators,” “hoods,” and “trucks.” There are no “flannels,” there are washcloths. There are no “tins,” there are “cans,” and you do not “bin” anything, you “can” it.

Whenever you use language that evokes associations foreign to your culture, you run the risk of producing more noise than signal. The bulk of your listeners are possibly unfamiliar with the native connotations of a word or phrase of foreign origin. Whichever connotations they do have may obscure the meaning, not enhance it. And the user, of course, comes off a regular tit, hungry for the regard they believe such language will lend them.

Language as prestige

Several times I’ve mentioned a concept that running through most of the negative language choices I’ve outlined here: language as signifier. Here language is used without any concern for denotative meaning. It is employed for the same reason that an overleveraged member of the middle class might buy a Tesla instead of a Hyundai: as an aspirational symbol of social exclusivity.

To paraphrase Kyle Smith, in his essay on the Italian playwright Pirandello, “An underreported aspect of modernism, and later postmodernism, was the seductive appeal of this species of flattery, the turn towards codes and signs designed to make viewers feel like sophisticated insiders — if, of course, they grasped (or merely pretended to grasp) the working of the [language].”

This grasping at the prestige a user believes such language will lend him is, again, an uncritical adoption of language, one which will reduce the speaker’s long term expressive power. This is a trade-off that damages not just the speaker’s idiolect, but the language of the community as a whole.

Rules

In an era in which far too many mistake opinions for facts, in which their leaders purposefully mislead, making investment in mistruths a rite of passage for their mystery cult, language is bound to wind up neglected or even mutilated.

But blind adherence to the “rules” of language can be troublesome. After all, the same people who appear to have made the rules governing language made the rules for what skin color is superior and what type of love is perverse. To be suspicious of rules is a mentally healthy habit.

However, to pretend that one choice is as good as another partakes of the same meaningless relativity as those whose edicts you’re resisting. You have to analyze everything yourself but that analysis must include you, yourself, and the language you use to express yourself.

What I have suggested above are not “rules” for how to speak “correctly.” (There are few things I enjoy as much as cursing, for example, and cursing is very much against the rules.) What I have suggested instead is a touchstone for meaning in a time of linguistic change. Is what you thought was an innovation merely a fad you’re following? Does a given change enable your language to flourish? Does it allow you to express more or does it shrink the number of concepts available to you?

That last question is key. Does the way I choose to speak increase my expressive power or does it strangle it?

All I’m asking you to do is to think before you speak.

Here are some additional observations and examples.

“House-made” is a marketing term of limited meaning. The word that already exists? “Homemade.”

To BBQ or not to BBQ

To BBQ or not to BBQ, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler on the grill to spice up
The slices and rashers of outrageous porkers,
Or to take the tongs against the meat and cobs
And by opposing brown them? Some pie to eat,
No more; and by a sheep to say we end
The heartburn and the thousand natural chops,
The flesh is hereon a consommé
Devoured in the dish. To die, to eat:
Some sheep, perchance sea bream—ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sheep that’s dead what meat is bunned

Pages: 1 2

The Dog Watches and Other Poems

I’ve written poems seriously for a very long time, occasionally publishing them. In the last few years, I noticed that almost every piddling literary journal was doing something that used to be considered sleazy, charging for reading. That was it for me.

But my friend Scott Taylor, a designer and poet himself, was interested in creating and publishing a book of my poems. So I brought together a long poem, The Dog Watches, about the city, and put it together with other city poems. It is now available on Amazon.

Unpublished “Julian” Poems

I originally translated these poems about Julian the Apostate by Constantine Cavafy for an essay I wrote called Denying Julian, for the Cavafy Forum, University of Michigan’s Modern Greek and Classics publication. I received access to them via literal English versions from the Cavafy Archive in Athens and turned them into English poems.

I had to wait to publish them on their own until another poet, who had previously been given access, published his book. I published them in a French journal called Nth Position, which, alas, has gone seins en l’air.

What’s Left of the Night — a review of sorts

The ladies and gentlemen of New Vessel Press, having seen my previous writing on the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy, offered me a copy of Ersi Sotiropoulos’s novel about the poet, What’s Left of the Night. I agreed to post my impressions on this blog.

Ties and knots

Ediety, or Merovingian

Eldredge

Trinity

How growing up in the Navy made certain truths self-evident

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – The Declaration of Independence

Diversity provides a competitive and creative edge, no matter your ethnicity.

I’m a straight, white son of the American working classes. They don’t come much more “cis” than me. Big, hairy, white guy from the rural west. Married. Can tie a tie. I hike, I’ve owned trucks, and I like country music (well, to a point). On the surface of things, it might not make sense to too many that I’m a ferocious proponent of “diversity.”

I want to explain why I am and why it makes me a better writer and why I would not willingly work in a monoculture.

GO NAVY!

I grew up in the United States Navy. I was born into it to a father who was a career sailor, who retired as a Senior Chief during my teenage years. For those of you who have not enlisted or grown up in the military, you need to understand that I until I was 14 I never spent two minutes in a room where everyone was white.

Digitizing Shakespeare

Our world is currently characterized by digitization. On a daily basis we interact with digital tools and properties. However, if we think about digitization in general, we probably think about the big things first: communications (who writes letters these days?), transportation (how many times have we cursed at the computers that make our new cars unfixable with a wrench and a willingness to bark our knuckles), and of course, weapons (drones, anyone?).

But the success of this technology on a large scale has given birth to an almost pathological willingness to experiment on a personal scale. Things we never would have thought needed digital versions – cabs, meals, maps, books, cigarettes, wine – we now can’t imagine in solely analog forms.

Part of this trend is commercial. Entrepreneurs and investors are looking for the proverbial next big thing and who’s to say that isn’t digital underpants that track your menses? Surveys only get you so far. After that you have to take the risk of producing and trying to sell the beeping networked panties of your dreams.

But an arguably more dignified reason for experimenting is the human desire to answer the question “What if?”

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant Hapus

Happy St. David’s Day, you sinning bastards.

That is all.

A Geographical History of San Francisco

Since we moved back to San Francisco last year, I’ve been taking pictures of places of literary and artistic note in the city. I published a post on “literary life in North Beach” on my agency’s blog. This is an ongoing and less geographically restrictive diary of the city’s literary, artistic, scientific, and political history.

 

202 Green Street, where on September 7, 1927, under the auspices of William Crocker (grandson of the transcontinental railroad magnate Charles) and the Crocker Bank, Philo T. Farnsworth and his “Lab Gang” sent the first TV signal ever broadcast to the Merchants Club about eight blocks away.