Confucius was right: Language needs rectifying
When Confucius was asked what would be his first measure in administering the kingdom, the Chinese sage in the 5th century B.C. answered: “To rectify language” (The Analects, XIII.3). We are at present assailed by bad language that is symptomatic, mostly, of lazy and sloppy thinking — and feeling.
Abuse of Man’s (and Woman’s) Oldest Habit permeates our being and environs. Thus invasive wars of aggression become special military operations; a planned murderous insurrection is christened legitimate political opinion; profound ignorance is now a new form of knowledge and elevated to skepticism; creepy antisocial speculators are veiled and idealized as entrepreneurs; reflection, conversation and thought are replaced by brainstorming.
The word “impact” has mercilessly infected daily parlance, as a verb: In physics, “impact” is seldomly used for a collision event (during which momentum and kinetic energy are transferred); dentists do properly speak of impacted third molars (and extract them at great expense to the a±icted); in medical practice an “impacted patient” is an unfortunate one who has a large amount of dry, hardened fecal matter lodged and retained in the lower portion of the large bowel, which often requires careful and diligent professional intervention. Sadly, even scientific journals allow for the misuse of the aforementioned word: In a recent issue of Science (Feb. 18, 2022, Vol. 375) a paleoanthropologist mentor had an “impact on” one of his students (page 723), exercise can “impact where fat is stored” (page 713), and we learn that the “lasting impact of [COVID-19] infection extends to the brain” (page 707). Scientific American in its April 2022 issue informs us of “Earth’s magnetic field … impacting” the navigation system for migration in birds (page 29). On Friday, April 1, listeners were told by the alarmed hostess of a respected daily news radio and television program, in this democracy of ours, that “400 votes could be impacting the election;” our local public radio station two Saturdays ago insightfully broadcasted that “national issues impact us locally.”
The news exercise peremptory seductions with sensational, bellicose, histrionic language charged with urgency, promoting the deleterious cult of ever-increasing size, speed and loudness. Grammar and syntax are alien to discourse, and alas becoming illegal. Punctuation in speech and writing is an aberration on its way to extinction. Acronyms saturate (not “impact the”) airways and networks, further narrowing the space and abridging the time for reflective, considerate thoughtfulness [In my experience, AI has mostly been Advertising Intrusiveness and Arrogance + Ignorance].
Superlatives are now a metastatic malignancy. Every event is “widely significant.” Malapropisms are lauded, repeated or unnoticed. The word “tragic” has become commonplace with no regard for its true rarity, its pathos or the indispensable component of free human choice that it entails.
I shall not be alarmed or depressed when soon subjected to a report of a disaster (natural, man-made or both) such as: “Z country was deeply impacted. The authorities brainstormed with the use of the latest dramatic state-of-the-art AI, and the tragic population was promptly evacuated.” Nor by an obituary in this vein: “Mr. X was terribly impacted by a heart attack very tragically at the age of 93. This deadly event significantly blunted and overwhelmed his lifestyle and deluged a severe torrential traumatic impactfulness on his reekingly wonderful, awesomely large family, which survives him.”
The Greek historian Thucydides relates how during the civil war in Corcyra (427 B.C.) words changed their usual meanings (The Peloponnesian War, Book III. 82-85), and how this phenomenon in turn caused the deterioration of (moral) character in the citizens. The Chinese and Greeks both, I gather, were fortunate two-and-half millennia ago by comparison to our present linguistic perversity.