Banished and Revived

Among the usual resolutions evoked by the optimism of a new year—to lose weight, gain family time, stop smoking, start helping, get organized—are those to banish or revive words, courtesy of institutions of higher learning.

Lake Superior State University distills a year’s worth of aggrieved e-mails into its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness. And in the opposite direction, Wayne State University’s Word Warriors announce their annual list of the year’s top words worth reviving.

Lake Superior would have us stop saying a dozen words or phrases, including amazing, occupy, and blowback, as well as pet parent and trickeration, words we’re less likely to use anyhow. On the other hand, the Word Warriors want us to “exercise freely” 10 words ranging from antediluvian to parlous. They probably want us to learn to spell them, too.

It’s worth asking, is either of these efforts going to make a difference? And the short answer is: No. Calling attention to words is not the way to get people either to use or to avoid them.

It’s not the way our minds work. Language changes not from talking about words but from using them.

And we use language we are accustomed to, without thinking about it. So even if we’d like to avoid amazing or occupy, we’ll find it hard to do. Those words are too much at home in nearly everyone’s vocabulary.

Amazing is so ensconced in our language that it is not amazing at all. As one of the Lake Superior nominators remarked, “The word has been overused to describe things only slightly better than mundane.” Occupy is like that too, just stretched a bit for a new meaning in 2011.

When we add to our vocabulary, we are likely to choose and use words that resemble the words and meanings we already know—indeed, that resemble familiar words and meanings so closely we may hardly notice they are new.

Calling attention to a word doesn’t get us to use it. In fact, the more it stands out, the less we’re likely to add it to our vocabulary. That’s why so few invented words have found a place in our language. Here’s a sample of clever inventions from a decade ago:

—AtmosFear, nervousness about pollution and possible attacks on our air, water, and food; invented by the trend-spotter Faith Popcorn.

—Boomeritis, sports injuries among people born between 1946 and 1964; invented by Dr. Nicholas DiNubile of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

—Paradessence, the paradoxical essence of a product; invented by Alex Shakar for his novel The Savage Girl.

So the Lake Superior banishers can relax their vigilance about pet parent and trickeration, terms that at best will hang on to the fringe of our language. They are too clever, too conspicuous.

That’s also the problem with reviving old or unusual words. They’re too conspicuous. Antedeluvian is conspicuously polysyllabic; parlous looks archaic; supercilious raises eyebrows; transmogrify is as conspicuous as ginormous on the banned words list. The Wayne State revival isn’t likely to effect many conversions.

I once wrote a book about this, Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). Guess what? Following this principle, my predictions of a decade ago have mostly come true.

And the principle that matters most here is, talking about a word isn’t the same as using it. So chances are, in their everyday conversation, when they aren’t paying close attention to the words they use, the Lake Superior banishers are likely to let slip an amazing now and then, and the Wayne State warriors may call their adventure perilous rather than parlous.