When language becomes ‘relatable’
Some words open up a chasm between the generations. To me, “relatable” is an uncommon term suggesting that a link can be drawn between two facts or ideas, as in “The federal government’s refusal to take climate change seriously is relatable to the economic clout of the oilpatch.” That’s what I suspect the word means to most readers of this column. But in high school, CEGEP and university, where the word often appears in student essays, “relatable” comes with a different meaning. My daughter (a student at Dawson College) gave me the following example: “In The Hunger Games, Peeta is very relatable.” In other words, he’s a sympathetic character; you can relate to him. The verb “relate” still needs its following “to,” but for many young people, the adjective “relatable” stands on its own.
“Relate” is among the countless words that have taken a long and winding road to its present meaning. Its now familiar sense of a psychological connection with someone else arose only in the late 1940s. Originally, the term meant to describe or narrate: “He will now relate his shocking adventures in Fredericton.” The word is related (of course!) to “relationship,” which used to evoke family ties, not romantic ones. It still carries an innocent sense in phrases like “Japan and Canada have a good relationship.” But if I were to say “I have a relationship with my niece,” eyebrows would jump, and if I said “I’m in a relationship with my niece,” the police might be notified. In 2012, “in a relationship” has come to have almost exclusively a sexual meaning.
Words evolve. They always have; they always will. There’s no point lamenting language change in its own right. The problem is, words sometimes evolve so fast that older people may be left unaware of the implications of what they’re saying – and younger people may have no idea that a common word once meant something entirely different. This becomes a tricky issue in the reading of great works of literature.
In Jane Austen’s novel Emma, nothing sexual is implied by the line “Their intercourse was painful enough by letter,” and conversation is the only thing that’s going on when we read about “the ejaculation in Emma’s ear.”
The novelist Will Self, in a recent posting on the BBC website, deplored the falling standards in British arts and humanities education, and lamented the resistance he faces for his desire to go on using little-known words in his work.
“Although,” he wrote, “the subject matter of my stories and novels – which includes such phenomena as sexual deviance, drug addiction and mental illness – has become quite unexceptionable, the supposedly difficult language they are couched in seems to have become more and more offensive to readers.”
Authors no longer have to worry about whether their writing is immoral; instead, they must battle charges of verbal elitism. Meanwhile, “the traditional set texts are now chopped up into boneless nuggets of Mcknowledge.”
I agree with Self up to a point. Sometimes a difficult word is the necessary and right word to use, and there’s nothing wrong with challenging students to expand their vocabularies. But, often, specialized vocabulary is self-defeating – it displays the author’s cleverness or erudition at the expense of clear communication. Big words that come from Latin and Greek may well provide less clarity and insight than the short, blunt words of Anglo-saxon.
Sometimes we use those grandiose Latin words without even knowing what they mean. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. The other day, I saw a crow-sized, black and red bird knocking holes into a dead tree. “Pileated woodpecker,” I said to myself. A few seconds later, a thought struck me: What in the world does “pileated” mean? Other North American birds with a fat modifier in their name include the prothonotary warbler, the ferruginous hawk, the flammulated owl and the semipalmated sandpiper. I would need to look up all those adjectives to grasp their meaning. Yet, as an occasional birdwatcher, I’ve been using them for decades – they’ve become a small part of my mental furniture.
“Pileated,” by the way, means “crested.” Will Self might disagree with me, but I think “crested woodpecker” would be a better name for the bird. Simpler. More relatable.