A reader has chastised me for misusing the word “annihilation” a couple of columns ago.
The reader pointed out that to annihilate means to reduce to nothing and I was being a typical journalist in exaggerating for effect.
I was suggesting that the Hare-Clark electoral system would save the Liberal Party from “the utter annihilation that a single-member system would otherwise deliver”.
Now this week’s column about words and the media, not local politics. And I usually don’t like nit-picking over reader’s comments, but it is, what journalists call, a peg – a peg upon which to hang a short essay.
In this case, Your Honour, I will happily plead guilty to the lesser charge of tautology, but not to the greater charge of word misuse.
I meant “annihilation”. Even on the booth-by-booth figures of the election result in 2004, you can only cobble together one seat for the Liberals in a hypothetical single-member system. So I meant that the Liberals would not win any seats in 2008 – annihilation.
Of course, there was no need to add the qualifier “utter”. It is just that the word gives an emphasis and a sense of finality. I was going to write that “utter” is a nice word, but it is only nice in the sense that it is pleasing, and not nice in the sense that “nice” means “with precision, skill or delicacy”. Far from it, “utter” or “utterly” is often superfluous.
But writers think it adds emphasis.
People like to add emphasis when telling stories. They want to attract attention. Inevitably, though, they slow change the meanings of words, so much so that the original meaning is lost and the word can no longer be used for that meaning.
Perhaps, we have lost the word “annihilate” in its original meaning. It now no longer means to reduce to nothing, but rather merely to inflict severe damage upon.
Other words are going or have gone the same way. Refute means to logically disprove. But writers, particularly print media journalists, use it when they really mean just to dispute an assertion, rather than logically disprove it, as in, “He refuted the assertion he was dishonest.” They do this as they search for emphasis or from a natural propensity for exaggeration to gain attention.
It is not a new phenomenon. It must be a human trait to exaggerate or startle by using words out of their ordinary range of meaning.
The word “awful” originally meant full of awe or wonder. It meaning changed in the 17th century to the present meaning.
So perhaps there is little point in riling against such an ingrained trend.
The other day I was talking to a keen surfer in his late 40s who obviously has picked up some of the word usage of his young peers.
He was talking about a recent holiday on a live-aboard dive boat in the Philippines. He said, “You should have seen this boat. It was filthy.”
I was about to commiserate with him over his ruined holiday when he went on: “Massive cabins. All the gear in top condition. Fantastic food. Filthy”
It dawned on me that the word “filthy” meant, in his vocabulary, the exact opposite of what it meant in mine.
I have heard the same has happened to the word “wicked”. Also, the word “random” is being applied to beautiful houses.
Whether the meaning of these words changes permanently is another matter. Their misuse might just be confined to the spoken word and only for a short term during a fad, while the written language keeps the words in their original meaning.
But some new meanings get misused so frequently and by people in positions of power and influence who are quoted in print misusing the words that the new meaning become acceptable. “Fulsome” and “beg the question” are examples. Fulsome used to mean cloyingly insincere as in Mark Antony calling Brutus as an “honourable” man when he meant showing how dishonourable he was. “Fulsome” now seems to mean “full”, sincere praise.
“Beg the question” no longer means circular argument, but merely posing a question.
People who know the true meaning of these words simply avoid them because they do not want to appear ignorant by applying the new meaning and realise that if they use them applying the old meaning no-one will get their meaning.
This month wereare seeing a change of meaning for the words “2020 vision”. It seems now to mean extraordinary, far-sighted vision – someone who can see as far ahead as 2020.
Alas, 2020 is merely the average, the ordinary. It is what the average person can see.
If you have 20/0 vision you see what the average person sees at 20 feet away. If you have 20/40 vision, from 20 feet away you can only see what the average person sees 40 feet away.
If you have 20/08 vision, it is terrific. From 20 feet away your vision is so good you can see what a normal person can see just eight feet from the chart. From 20 feet away you could read that the chart was “made in China” whereas the average person could only read the line above that: “H G T Y V X”.
Leave aside that a forward-looking, metric nation would have 6/6 vision – six metres being roughly 20 feet.
Anyway, I suspect, though, that in 12 years’ time this misusage of 2020 vision will be annihilated.