hamodia.com http://hamodia.com/features/do-you-speak-peevish/

By MordechaiSchiller

Do You Speak Peevish?

Tuesday, July 7, 2015 | " '

What do you feed a pet peeve?

You dont need to feed it anything. It eats you up.

In January 1976, W.T. Rabe, then public relations director at Lake Superior State University, hit on an innovative wayto get the word out: He proclaimed and publicized a Banished Words List.

For the first list, Rabe brainstormed with faculty and staff members at a party. They put their pet peeves in a big pen

and published them. Soon, the banished words list became a popular firing range for people targeting misused andoverused words.

Over the 40 years since the first list, the words and phrases most subject to banishment are those spread via socialmedia. They tend to have a uniquely short half-life as they flash from flavor of the day to so-five-minutes-ago.

The 2015 list includes hack which got skewered for both misuse and overuse. The worlds most famous hacker,Kevin Mitnick, went to prison in 1999 for his exploits. Today, Mitnick is a leading security expert. And since hisexploits, the meaning of hacking has gone mainstream. From its original sense of gaining access into impenetrablecomputer systems, hack was diluted to its current meaning of tricks or tips.

Some of the banished words seem too old to appear on a 2015 list. One of them is pushing 80: enhancedinterrogation. That phrase has a long and tortured history. A 2007 article in Atlantic traced it to Nazi Germany. Thephrase Verschrfte Vernehmung is German for enhanced interrogation. Other translations include intensifiedinterrogation or sharpened interrogation. Its a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937 to describe aform of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials wereexperiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court.

Another target for takedown was takeaway. Oxford Dictionaries online issued a quarterly update in 2012 thatincluded this maligned word: takeaway, n. [new sense]: a key fact, point, or idea to be remembered, typically oneemerging from a discussion or meeting.

The problem I find with the list is that it has all the authority of customer reviews on store websites. No oneinterviewed expert lexicographers or linguists to get their take on words that we can do without.

The 2008 Banished Word List included wordsmith. I beg to differ. Wordsmith is widely used to mean a word maven or a writer who works in words the way other artists work in oils or clay. You can call me a wordsmith. I wont beinsulted!

The problem of ephemeral words that become popular isnt new. H.W. Fowler wrote in Fowlers Modern EnglishUsage: Every now and then a word emerges from obscurity, or even from nothingness or a merely potential and notactual existence, into sudden popularity. He called these verbal vagabonds vogue words.

Ready acceptance of vogue words seems to some people the sign of an alert mind; to others it stands for the herdinstinct and lack of individuality Fowler said. On the whole, the better the writer, or at any rate the sounder hisstyle, the less will he be found to indulge in the vogue word.

A wise man I know once heard someone use a phrase that had become popularized in the media. He compared it tosomeone chewing a stick of gum, then passing it around from person to person for each one to take a chew.

Feh!

Like many such mindless phrases, that spread like a meme. What is a meme? Richard Brodie says in Virus of theMind that the word meme was coined by Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, who said, The meme is the basic unit ofcultural transmission, or imitation.

Brodie defines meme: An idea, the kind of complex idea that forms itself into a distinct memorable unit. It is spreadby vehicles that are physical manifestations of the meme.

Ben Zimmer, word columnist for The Wall Street Journal, wrote in Wired that one of the most powerful memes ofrecent times was I cant breathe, the dying words of Eric Garner.

But the very visceral punch of the phrase risks undermining its power. As Zimmer wrote: Undoubtedly, converted intoa glib hashtag, #ICantBreathe can bear all the hallmarks of social-media slacktivism, an easy assertion of

identification with the oppressed. But such is the fate of any successful slogan. Thats especially true in the age ofhashtagification, when todays vibrant meme is tomorrows stale clich.

Mindless memes make a hash of the English language.

Please send smiles, sticks and stones to language@hamodia.com.

Do You Speak Peevish?