The Extinction Series: Introduction

Some wonderful words and phrases, those with unique meanings or special nuances, are becoming extinct. Once they are used interchangeably with some other word or phrase, whether it is blander or just different, their special meaning is lost. A compact, precise way to communicate an idea is gone. Something longer and maybe fuzzier must be substituted. Or people stop putting the idea into words at all because it is just too difficult. So thoughts die, too.

I liken this to the problem with living species.

I was let to this analogy by someone who had written 'fulsome praise' and I wrote back that I didn't think she meant 'fulsome.' We had gone to school together and I had a high opinion of her writing. But she got huffy. She cited a dictionary that said 'fulsome' could mean 'full.'

Well, she hadn't mean to give 'full praise,' either. I would use 'full praise' when the praised person has received criticism or, at best, faint praise and I wished to convey disagreement with the disparagers. Like 'full marks': you don't bother to say you give someone 'full marks' for something when all the other judges have already given the person 10 out of 10. Or so my mental ear tells me.

Yes, when I read or write, I hear. I explain that "I read with my ears" and that the words I read appear in my mind's ear not my mind's eye. I've only recently discovered that not everyone reads that way. But I believe that the best writers read their own work with their ears. In fact they write with their ears without conscious effort. When people ask me to look over something they've written, I can always tell if they are eye-readers. If so, I recommend that they read their work aloud or have someone else read it to them. Once they do that, they can fix their writing all by themselves. Good writing - yes, even technical writing and legal writing - can be read aloud easily and smoothly.

What my schoolmate meant was not 'fulsome' but 'great' or 'heartfelt' praise and certainly 'sincere' praise. What she did not mean was praise so excessive that it conveyed that she meant the opposite of praise, which is what - to my mind's ear - 'fulsome praise' is. By the way, I rarely resort to dictionaries. That is because my years of reading by ear inform my definitions and give me confidence that I am right. It's also because of what I think of as the Wordly Wise problem with modern dictionaries and modern vocabulary teaching. See future post.

The writer of 'fulsome' also argued that language is always changing, words are created and destroyed all the time, and I should chill, not be a pedant, get over it, suck it up. Or anyway, that was her subtext.

I didn't continue the thread but that's when it occurred to me that living species are constantly being created and destroyed, too. Yet that is not the end of the story. The problem today is that the creation of species seems to be lagging far behind the destruction. Known species are becoming extinct faster than new species are being discovered. And I don't think that's for lack of looking.

I fear it is the same with words. We are losing more than we are gaining.

This series will serve as an Endangered Species List for the English language.

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rjm 20180220

CONTENTS (To be updated whenever I add to the series. Please use the comment box to suggest words and phrases I should include.)

01. RETICENT too often is confused with reluctant. Link appears in Extinction 01.

02. WAKE - X in the WAKE of Y - refers only to an X that comes after Y, never to an X that comes before Y. A sighting of a misused WAKE on 2/20/18 is the subject of Extinction 02.

03. BEGS THE QUESTION now means 'raises the question' almost all the time. (A long-ago email to NPR, which I like to think was somewhat successful at the time, will be turned into a post.)

04. DISINTERESTED now means UNINTERESTED, more often than not. In these corrupt and truth-disparaging times, we need a word that clearly means what careful speakers and writers meant when they wrote DISINTERESTED. (An entry for a 1992 Legal Writing coursepack and several emails will be turned into a post.)