Moderator Note
Let’s keep the political potshots out of GQ.
Colibri
GQ Moderator
We’re allowed to use our own lingo, for twenty minutes, in the Marianas trench.
Because they are presenting to us.
In that context idiosyncratic use of words is either done out of ignorance of how idiosyncratic the usage is, or intentional for some reason. When done by consultants I suspect the latter is more frequently the case.
IANAM, but as an ordinary poster my WAG is that it’s at least allowed in the MMP. All the Mumpers gettin’ sheveled and caffeinatin’ over at MPSIMS would agree. Even swampy and OYKW.
As I first heard the story, the King described it as “awful, amusing, and artificial”, all three words whose meanings have drifted. But when I checked the source, I found that was something of an urban legend. The original warrant, which I found on a site called quoteinvestigator.com, reads:
The article cites a 1903 history of English churches that claimed the dean of the cathedral called Wren’s design “most awful and artificial”. Later this was taken up by different newspaper columns on language change, including a 1938 magazine article that reproduced the quote as “amusing, awful, and artificial”, and attributed it to King James. Other stories credited it to King William III and to Queen Anne.
But the only solid citation is the warrant of Charles, where he only used “artificial”.
Some of us are fastidious about how we use those, as well. Anyway, what I object to is the loss of its previous use, more than the fact that it’s being used for something else. The use of “actually” as an intensifier dulls its literal sense, but it doesn’t nullify it. If “literally” is mainly understood as “figuratively,” it’s a net loss, because there’s already a host of words that mean “figuratively,” and precious few that mean “literally.”
When I was in college majoring in English, adverbs in general were frowned upon. Unless we were making a comparison, and wanted to reuse a verb for the sake of parallelism, there was no use for adjectives. In other words, “stroll” was better than “walk slowly,” unless the entire point was that it was slower than some other instance of walking.
“The Official Story is that he slipped on the soap. However…”
It hits my ear as wrong, and I desperately want to change it to “minted” money. I don’t know whether it’s because that’s not exactly what “coined” means, or because it somehow sounds redundant.
Looking at ngrams, “coined” has been overwhelmingly the more common word over the past 200 years, usually by a 10 to 1 ratio. A mint is the place where money is coined, so the extension of “making” or “creating” as a verb would naturally arise from the active “coin” rather than the passive “mint.”
Just a small note to say that you messed up the quotes – no big deal, but I did not say the thing you accidentally quoted me as saying. That was the rest of the sentence written by bob_2.
True. Each case is a little different. But collectively they make McWhorter’s main point that words change in meaning (duh), sometimes in fun and unexpected ways (also duh). Not rocket science…but worth repeating, to counter the human tendency toward attachment to illusory stasis. Ommmmm…
I don’t know what people used to convey what you mean by “literally” in the early 1800s - but they didn’t use “literally” (“literally” being used for another purpose). I can think of a wide variety of choices for conveying actuality - though most of them are informal (“There was no-kidding/no-shit/straight-up/honest-to-God/hand-to-God blood coming out of his eyes”).
Weirdly, I can imagine the evolution of the use of “literally” going a different way - since the word was associated with words and writing, it could have become associated with literary concepts like “figurativeness” rather than with actuality (that evolution might even make more sense than what occurred in our history - language does what language does).
Here’s Wellington describing the Battle of Waterloo, probably in the same decade that Jane Austen wrote her complaint about the looseness of the word.
“It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. … By God! I don’t think it would have been done if I had not been there.”
Wellington meant it was ‘close, finely balanced, precarious’ rather than ‘agreeable or delightful’.
Concerning gaslighting; I note that (during the First World War) the gas companies in the UK would use the gas pressure as advanced warning of an air attack by Zeppelins. If an air-raid was imminent the pressure would fluctuate up and down, and the lights would dim and grow bright.
At least some of the people who went to see Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light would remember this fluctuation with some sense of trepidation, and this may have contributed to the tension.
There was also some irony in the name: the lights dimming was actually unintentional. All the other things Bella’s (play)/Paula’s (movie) husband did were deliberately designed to make her doubt herself-- except the lights. He was simply searching the attic in secret, but whenever he did, using the gas in the attic caused the lights in the rest of the house to dim.
And a good thing, because without that tension things could get chaotic. You still want one generation to be able to communicate with the one before and the one after, even as things change.
And it was touched upon upthread, part of the issue with changes in some meanings has to do with oversuse. Abuse of adverb forms and other intensifiers is one aspect of it; in my previous paragraph there is no need to say “actually communicate” but the temptation to throw that in for emphasis is strong.
I have read, that to be good at breaking the rules , you have to be good at knowing what are the rules you are breaking.
That is, pandering and demagoguery. But “gaslighting” sounds like, well, like you have a cool cultural referent.
True. Even if they ARE wrong, their insisting on it would not be not “gaslighting”. Just common pigheadedness. Or outright lying. .
That is said about a lot of things (like my profession, photography), but I’m not sure I agree. It’s a pithy adage I used to adhere to, but like most pithy adages, it overgeneralizes. There are talents that come out of left field, who just have their own vocabulary, their own eye, their own ears (in the case of music), and don’t know the rules. But they produce beautiful, interesting works and have an instinct for it. Perhaps not knowing the rules gives them more creative freedom and allows them to express themselves more uniquely and more personally. I just don’t like breaking down the creative process to tidbits like “you have to know the rules to break the rules.” No, you don’t. For a certain type of person (like me) that helps. For others, it hinders.
IOW true “outsider art”.
Probably for some rare geniuses that is true, but I’ve helped a lot of new writers, and 99% of the time, “I don’t need rules, I’m an artist” means, “I’m not that good and I don’t plan on doing any work to improve my craft.”
Also consider that a lot of artists who claim not to use /know the rules have internalized the rules just by the sheer volume of work they have exposed themselves to. They break the rules because they already understand the rules innately.
Others have to work to understand it.
And of course understanding it doesn’t mean it’s suddenly easy to do. As I am learning right now.
I’m not really even thinking that. I mean, look at the Beatles, for instance. They didn’t really “know” the rules in any formal way – sure, we can say they internalized it by being around music. But that’s the same with language – we “learn” the rules by internalizing the language around us. There’s a secondary set of formal rules that we have to learn by being taught them. I don’t think the formal set is necessarily necessary to create successful works. The Beatles and many musicians did fine without knowing a lick about music theory or what rules they were breaking or why they were breaking them when they were breaking them. It just sounded good.
And there is always a segment of the creative population like that. I just hate those kinds of generalizations. I used to have that rigid attitude with photographers under my purview, and it tends toward, I feel, homogenization. That rule does work for me; but I’ve met other photographers – and those are the ones whose work excites me – who do everything “wrong” but whose work looks right. It’s really the darnedest thing.
Anyhow, I think I set this off on a philosophical tangent.
That’s like saying: “on paper”. In that sense, I think it is similar to “officially”.
Yeah, in that sense, “officially” means “according to conventional wisdom,” or something similar. It doesn’t mean literally officially (heh), in that it has been dictated by an authoritative body. But the peer pressure of conventional wisdom can act very much like an authoritative body, so the usage of “officially” in this manner does actually make sense.