I think the point is that the way one writes the narrative of fiction (dialog aside) is usually different from the way one speaks in casual conversation. Sometimes it might not be, depending on the effect one wants to achieve, but it usually is. And it’s in casual spoken and written language – especially the former – that the word “very” still has a great deal of utility, IMHO. On the opposite extreme, it would typically be a very bad choice in creative writing. And yes, I just used it, and I think it served a purpose here.
Unique is the one that annoys me. It should mean singular, like no other, but it has become commonly used as a simile for rare. One sees modifiers like “very unique” which should not be possible.
It is similar to the use of infinite as a simile for a huge number.
Fair enough. But I know a lot of high school English teachers who cross out every “very” in expository or analytical writing and bitch and moan about it, because they read that quote and took it too literally. They get all condescending about weak vocabulary. I have a knee jerk reaction to putting that sort of proscriptivist voice in a struggling, reluctant writer’s head.
Finding your voice is about learning what to say, not a lot of rules about what good writers don’t do.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think I can kind of shoehorn it into the subject of this thread, because what’s considered good writing has changed tremendously over the years. Scores of classics break all the rules and still manage to be banging good stories. A lot of contemporary writing advice comes from editors of genre fiction and are focused on selling books. The kind of language you would typically employ to write a thriller is very different than if you were crafting a literary novel. Yet and still, I’m reading a thriller that is told from the first person perspective of a backcountry yokel. It uses a limited and repetitive vocabulary to great effect. (The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.)
So what makes great writing is entirely subjective and has changed throughout history. And there are people who will be stifled by rules and others who will benefit from them, and I think where and when and how those rules resonate depends a lot not only on genre, but where someone is in their writing journey.
I don’t know what it’s called, but Jane Austen was clearly familiar with the phenomenon:
"…But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”
“The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”
“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.”
“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”
“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”
“While, in fact,” cried his sister, “it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise. Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best…"
– Northanger Abbey (c. 1803)
C. S. Lewis, in his book Studies in Words, notes that this phenomenon happens often with worlds. Their definitions tend to get broader and broader. He referred to this as verbicide in some places in the book.
Because of another thread on language here I decided to do so. That is, I checked out my collection of William Safire’s columns from his “On Language” column. The first book was from 1980. It was full of moans about the way language was being abused and advice on how to write good. By the 1990s, though, the tone had entirely changed. Too many people had beaten him over the head about prescriptivism, especially when it was being applied to places that it had no business getting near, like in advertising headlines. He did much more reporting on new uses of language and etymology.
He stopped issuing regular compilations about that time as well. Apparently, his books just weren’t as fun without the scolding letters, half from the “you of all people” prescriptivist crowd pointing out his own errors of school marm grammar and the other half from people who actually understood English and tore him to pieces on every so-called fact.
Since that time I think that almost all those who think about the issue have picked up on the reality that formal prose is rarely used by ordinary people. The written language has almost infinite gradations, from academic prose to popular magazine style to message board conversations to Twitter to text messages. Spoken language is also a different species from written language and never should be subject to the same rules and limitations.
That has never meant that anything goes, as some prescriptivists claim. Sticking apostrophes into plurals remains wrong. Why? Because almost all educated writers agree that it is, and it violates grammar rather than usage. Usage is far more slippery. Whether online communication is the equivalent of written or spoken language or a third, new type is still undetermined. Those who post in threads about language tend to use mostly proper language, partly because that’s what feels normal to them and partly to make a point that they understand the subject. Other threads will show much more variation in tone and properness. That’s proper, too. Context is everything.
About 15 years ago I did a presentation in my linguistics class defending L33T speak. I’m fascinated by how online communication has evolved.
I’m curious about the usages people have mentioned.
I’ve seen some broadening of gaslighting, but not to the point of it being useless. It seems to mean lying to someone’s face, in a way that is extremely obvious, as if said lie can get the poster to question reality. It’s just not necessarily reserved for full on abusive situations.
For example, a poster will say something clearly hateful. Then another poster will respond about how bad that is. And then the person will come back and claim they didn’t say what very clearly did say and that the person is just getting upset over nothing. But you can scroll up and see they did say it.
I’ve also seen it used for politicians when they make bold faced lies that even the tiniest bit of knowledge would show is false. It’s always an attempt to claim something bad didn’t happen when it did, or something bad happened when it didn’t.
It seems to me that the rise in the term’s usage is heavily correlated with the rise of such tactics. I know I can’t remember such tactics being used a decade ago, at least.
Well, the usage has certainly broadened. Its original meaning was to consciously manipulate someone’s perception of reality in an attempt to make them believe they are crazy. I would argue that the original dynamic required the victim to be isolated in order to pull this off.
No politician would fit this definition, IMO. No layperson with a fierce political allegiance is being called on to question their own sanity. It’s more that they are hearing what they want to hear and accepting it without question. Nobody is trying to make the opposition believe they are crazy. They are just straight - up lying for the benefit of those who believe.
As for more colloquial usage, and what prompted this thread, every damned time some woman on my favorite Subreddit complains about a relationship issue, someone has to comment that she’s being gaslighted. Today it was a man who refused to wash his hands after traveling before he embraced his new baby. Mom was pissed, Dad told her she was overreacting, and apparently having a differing opinion is now “gaslighting.”
I think what I really hate about this usage is that it implies malicious intent. Abusers do this on purpose. Some otherwise competent new father arguing with his wife, not so much. It’s a nasty accusation to hurl at someone, possibly to the long-term detriment of the relationship.
I’ve also seen the term used for plain old contradiction or disagreement whose validity the contradicted party just doesn’t want to confront or acknowledge. I say the sun rises in the west, you say “No, it rises in the east”, and I respond “Stop it with your gaslighting, you’re just trying to manipulate my belief!”
(tangent)
Alanis gets a lot of stick over this, I’ve seen at least two stand-up routines about how Americans don’t get irony, and that this song is the prime example of it.
But I disagree, I think within the limitations of needing to write song lyrics that fit with a melody, she does a decent job of giving examples of irony.
It’s taken 20-something years but we’re going to put this controversy to rest!
Yes, yes. It’s a good thing that happened.
Glances nervously at the seven-year old.
Which version did you watch? The 1944 version with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer is one of the best movies ever made. Bergman won a well-deserved Oscar for her performance. However, there was another version a few years earlier, which wasn’t very good.
My high school Latin teacher used to get a bug up her butt about this. She insisted that “unique” could not take a modifier, for the reasons you outline, except that she’d get going and say that it could not take a modifier at all.
I asked “What about ‘almost unique,’ like if there were two of something?”
Her head exploded.
It’s not really Morissette’s fault-- people were using “irony” incorrectly long before she came along. But people had been using it to mean “uncanny,” not “unfortunate.”
“Ironic” just means (or, “meant,” if you prefer, “a counterintuitive outcome,” or “an outcome opposing expectations”). It comes from a Greek word that meant “sham,” and used to apply to figures of speech-- so it kind of meant the same thing as “sarcasm,” which means it’s already come a ways.
Irony could be in the eye of the beholder. Say, the minister’s daughter joins a death metal band, or the sheriff’s son becomes a drug dealer; to some people, those are ironic outcomes, but to other people, they were completely predictable.
There’s an idea for a song.
There’s another usage that sometimes irritates me: “Pretty” (whether or not followed by “much”) as an intensifier, usually followed by an adjective to be intensified.
- The oven is pretty hot now.
- That box is pretty heavy.
- We had a pretty big dinner.
- That girl is pretty pretty ?
(The definitions at Merriam-Webster are a little more careful and nuanced than this. But my point remains: To me, “pretty” should only be an adjective meaning something like “esthetically pleasing to the eye” and seeing it used as an adverb to modify an adjective always jars me.)
My point is the song was not merely describing unfortunate events.
For example “10 thousand spoons when all you need is a knife”. That’s irony.
Unfortunate would be simply not having a knife when you need a knife. The 10,000 spoons is an irrelevance except in terms of the irony.
Now, one of the standup routines said what would actually be irony would be finding that you had a knife after all. That would be an extra layer of irony that would push it into being amusing (as a standup comedian would be wont to do) but it already was ironic, even if mildly so.
Only if you reasonably expected one of those spoons to be a knife. A single spoon could be irony when you need a knife, if, for example, it is a folded spoon that looks like a pocket knife. 10,000 spoons in a place where you would expect to find spoons, particularly where you would not necessarily expect a knife, is not irony.
Which you normally do of course. In the vast majority of contexts where one piece of cutlery like a fork or knife is available, so are the others.
(Actually if the song had said “10,000 knives when all you need is a spoon” then I would get the quibble, as knives are much more general-purpose than spoons, so there are a number of situations where knives may be available, but not spoons, but rarely the other way round).
That would be the most straightforward reading of the line.
But anyway, even trying hard to conceive of a situation where we would expect to only find spoons, I still think that would be ironic. For example, say I am the owner of a factory that only manufactures spoons, no other cutlery. At some crucial time I find I desperately need a knife, and discover that there is not a single knife in the whole building. Yes it’s ironic, because I have literal tons of cutlery available; I’m an expert in cutlery, making a living from manufacturing it but none of it is the type that would be vaguely useful right now. That absolutely fits with what we’d call ironic in everyday language.
It is, in the US at any rate. But it is not consistent with what “ironic” has historically meant. This is all I’m saying.
Say, I wanted to quibble about the meaning of “literally,” and you said that using it to mean “figuratively” “absolutely fits with … everyday language”; you would be correct. I would also be correct in saying that is not the historical meaning of the word, and is in fact at odds with its etymology.
I understood the topic of the thread to be about meaning drift of words.