The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (17 page)

If you enjoy Frank ’n’ Stein, let me recommend a few other eateries that may have escaped your notice.

There is Health’s Angels, a natural food restaurant for bikers; Howe’s Bayou, for kosher Cajun cuisine; and finally (one I am sorry to say may shortly go belly-up) Pieces of Ate, which specializes in used food.

Harvey Fried

New York, New York

Fulminations.
The specialists are in open rebellion at the theft of their vocabularies. Egged on by sly agitation in this space to fulminate about raids by the general public on their fields’ linguistic larders, the specialists have at last found an outlet for their ire at the twisting of their favorite terms.

“I cannot resist the invitation to rail against the boneheaded misuse of
organic,
” fulminates Stephen Slatin, at the Department of Physiology and Biophysics of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. “It does not, or certainly should not, mean ‘vegetables grown without fertilizers’ or ‘fruit produced without pesticides.’ ”

Right on, says Richard Fireman of Chicago: “
Organic
used to mean ‘carbon based.’An ‘inorganic food’ would be an oxymoron”—prescriptive us-agists would insist on the more specific “contradiction in terms”—“unless someone knows a way to get nourishment from stones.”

Chemists think of an “organized body” as an animal or plant containing compounds derived from hydrocarbons; they call that kind of chemistry
organic
and bristle at the “unscientific” extension of meaning into food “grown without chemical additives or genetic manipulation.”

Geologists, too, excoriate lay writers with rocks in their heads. When I wrote that San Jose was the
epicenter
of the California computer industry’s power consumption, Julian Stone of Rumson, New Jersey, noted: “
Epicenter
is a scientific term referring to the point on the surface of the earth above the underground focus of an earthquake. Do you mean that the center of power consumption in California is underground?”

The geophysicist Joseph D. Sides adds, “Writers should be advised that
epi-
no more intensifies the meaning of
center
than does
pen-
intensify the meaning of
ultimate
.” (The prefix
epi-
most often means “on” or “over”;
pen,
not a prefix, is from the Latin
pæne,
“almost.”) Sides defines
epicenter
as “the point on the surface of the earth vertically above the center of an earthquake, the quake’s ‘hypocenter.’” It is also, he says, “the point on the earth’s surface vertically below the atmospheric detonation of a bomb, the ‘hypercenter’ of the explosion.” He finds “misuse of the offending term attributable to spurious erudition on the part of the writers combined with scientific illiteracy on the part of copy editors.”

Is your understanding of these terms growing exponentially? No! thunders a totality of mathematicians. “I’m vexed to hear some trend described as ‘growing
exponentially
’ when the writer means it is growing rapidly,” writes Maurice Fox of Arlington, Virginia. “
Exponential
growth is not necessarily rapid. The mathematical term merely describes something whose rate of growth is proportional to its size. My savings account grows
exponentially
but not rapidly.”

Geometric, or compound, growth can be fast or slow; if our economy grows by 0.1 percent a year, that’s
exponential,
but the stock market tanks. A professor of physics at Tufts University, Roger Tobin, is equally annoyed at the lay misuse of
exponential
to mean “a whole lot,” referring to quantity rather than rate of growth, “but to say my annoyance is
exponentially
greater today than yesterday is gibberish.”

Tobin is not offended, however, by a general use of
quantum
to mean “sudden,” provided we don’t use it to mean “huge”: “The crucial characteristic of a
quantum jump
isn’t its size but its abruptness—something goes from one state to another without passing through any intermediate states in between.” That’s one of the “stolen meanings” that started this specialist agitation, which is growing fast if not exponentially.

Those intellectuals who name their companion animals Peeve (to be able to say “This is my pet, Peeve”) have as their ally Jacques Barzun, America’s only best-selling nonagenarian. “A couple of misplaced technicalities,” he writes from San Antonio. “
Synergy,
which belongs to physiology and relates to the working together of muscles, etc. Applied to the merger of two clothing firms (actual), it is ridiculous, especially since technically the meaning is ‘greater effect than the sum of the efforts.’”

A semantic theft by educators is
module,
which Professor Barzun says “is used ambiguously to mean ‘a class period’ and ‘a portion of program.’ (Years ago, it was ‘nucleus.’) A
module
in architecture or building generally is a part that does not change size, character or function and thus serves as a measure of a larger whole. In a column, it is the measurement itself—half the diameter of the base.”

Architects, too, have their linguistic bêtes noires. (“Peeve, meet my
bête,
Noire.”) “I am very annoyed at the current usage of the term
architect,
” writes Fran Read, who is one. “Examples include ‘
architect
of the peace plan,’ ‘software
architect
’ and in the phrase spoken by several CEO’s and commentators on CNBC, ‘We
rearchitected
the software.’”

Read’s pique is superstructured by Tim Groninger, a project engineer. “Word thievery in engineering has become especially acute,” he seethes, “due to the ever-growing hunger for words in the world of computers. I can no longer use the word
architecture
in the traditional sense. The word now implies the design and construction of computer networks, not buildings.”

The architect Edwin Elias-Narvaez piles on with “It is particularly galling to perform an Internet search for
architect
only to find thousands of references having nothing to do with the traditional meaning of the word.”

(The magazine
Architectural Record
recently interviewed Richard Saul Wurman, who said: “I invented the term
information architect
in 1975, when I was national chairman of the AIA [American Institute of Archi-tects] convention in Philadelphia. It was called ‘The
Architecture of Information
.’ Now I would say that somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 people in the U.S. have
information architect
on their business cards.”)

Fulminations from other fields are still coming in. Ophthalmologists narrow their eyes at the nearsighted semantic theft of their
myopic
. Yoga practitioners in rooster position cock-a-doodle mellowly but firmly about the extension of
guru
from “revered teacher and spiritual leader” to a sarcastic “self-appointed cult figure.” And most of all, logicians everywhere pose the query, What are the philistines doing to our
beg the question
?

The specialists are not going to take it anymore.

Stephen Slatin, you report, “rail[s] against boneheaded misuse of
‘organic’
thus: ‘It does not, or certainly should not, mean “vegetables grown without fertilizers” or “fruit produced without pesticides.”’” Perhaps Mr. Slatin should see a phrenologist. On one point he is simply mistaken: organic does mean “grown without fertilizers” and “produced without pesticides.” Just ask your specialist in the produce section of your supermarket or their patrons. As to whether it “certainly should not” mean this, does Mr. Slatin mean an a priori certainty deducible from the deep structure of the language itself or an observational certainty based on universally accepted, peer-reviewed, reproducible results obtained under controlled conditions? Perhaps Mr. Slatin intends the conditional meaning of
should
as in it “certainly should not mean” this (were I to become the final arbiter of English usage). Or perhaps he means “certainly” only as an intensifier and not to mean irrefutable. I hate it when folks do that.

And why do physicists refer to the likeliest location of an electron in an atom as an
orbital
despite the obsolescence of the planetary model of the atom? They also refer to the elliptical paths of celestial bodies as “orbits.” Orbs are spheres. They’re round, you blockheads.

And why do doctors insist on perpetuating their arcane Greek and Latin anatomical nomenclature when universally understood and unambiguous substitutes are available? (Or one might say, “Why do doctors still use fancy words for parts of the body when simple ones would do as well?”) Is
anterior
superior to
front
? Is
rear
inferior to
posterior
? Does
upper arm bone
sound any funnier than
humerus?

Barry Brown

Nashua, New Hampshire

Ballistic may well sound impressive but is totally wrong (just as a measure of distance—the light year—is wrongly used to describe a long period of time). Moving under the force of gravity only, thus an intercontinental ballistic missile is fired (under rocket power) into the heavens and when the rocket cuts out or whatever, it continues on its way where its course is determined by gravity and the momentum imparted by the prior rocket power. Thus an ICBM may well explode upon impact with its target (because it contains an explosive warhead) but to go ballistic is not to explode—it is to coast after an initial boost ceases. Similarly, as the bullet leaves the barrel of a gun the explosive force that propels the bullet has been exhausted and the trajectory is determined by gravity and the previously imparted momentum—the bullet is coasting—& this is why the ’60s TV cop shows I grew up with always had investigations by the “guys from ballistics.”

Malcolm Park

University of Melbourne

Melbourne, Australia

Your last column was turned into a soapbox for a bunch of language curmudgeons. It seems only fair that you give some equal box time to some looser linguistic thinkers.

Words get reused in different disciplines and words become trendy and overused, but neither of these things makes a word usage incorrect or inappropriate. If the curmudgeons had their way, every word would have a fixed definition and there would be no poetry. (For what is poetry but a play on words?) Where would our language be if it wasn’t allowed to move, stretch and dance? Oh wait, language cannot dance, dancing applies only to physical objects, right?

It is fair to criticize a true misuse (like
penultimate
or
literally,
both of which are misused all the time), but these people seem to have no love of language, only a bean counter’s love of organization and rules.

I suggest that these people just need to pull their collective noses out of their professional journals and pick up a good work of fiction or poetry. Or even a bad one for that matter—anything to get them out of their literal heads for a moment.

Ben Gold

New York, New York

I think one must include “periodically.” The term has come to be used to mean “occasionally” or “infrequently” when, in fact, it means “regularly,” regardless of what frequency is being described. An item, as I am sure I do not have to explain to you, is periodic if it occurs annually, monthly, weekly or each second. The period of a pendulum is the time it takes for it to complete a sweep of its arc, to and then fro. Periodicals arrive daily, semi-annually, et cetera. “Periodicity” refers to “frequency” in a number of scientific applications including chemistry, physics and, more specifically, electricity.

But of course, many folks use “periodically” in everyday speech to indicate that they do or experience something only once in a while. They may, in fact, experience it periodically-but likely not. Probably, they experience it occasionally, and at irregular intervals, and believe that suffices it to be periodic.

Mark Foggin

New York, New York

The chemists should talk! They themselves have hijacked the word “organic” which simply means, “of use, useful,” especially in reference to the body (obviously from the Greek
organikos
). But when science hijacks something, that’s called a definition.

John Hymers

Universiteit Leuven

Leuven, Belgium

I enjoyed your recent article on “penultimate” and its Latin origins. I was a little surprised that you didn’t use my favorite Latin example, peninsula (
pæne,
“almost” +
insula,
“island”).