When words were scary...

There was a time when the most popular way to scare your closest friends and family was through relatively simple and straightforward stories. Well before Halloween became all about dressing up your dog like a cat or a bumblebee or Ron Paul (depending on the breed), All Hallow’s Eve was a time for sitting around and telling tales of the dead. Ghost stories were also the most traditional way to spend Christmas Eve, particularly in Victorian England (“A Christmas Carol,” anyone?).

But over time, good, old-fashioned ghost stories have lost some of their ability to spook. While many of you reading this might prefer a fireside reading of Edgar Allen Poe, most Americans will be off at Paranormal Activity 3.

Mr. E. A. Poe: A scary dude who knew how to use scary words.But aside from all the additional competition and our ever-shrinking attention spans, it seems that words themselves—certain words that used to chill, frighten, horrify, spook, and plenty of other synonyms for scare—have lost their power to petrify.

For example: creepy. When it first joined the language in 1831, this adjective referred to "the sensation of the flesh creeping in horror." But it no longer creeps out too many people, particularly the members of Generation Text. As University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman observed on his blog, Language Log, teenagers are using the expression “That’s so creepy…” to qualify coincidental or unexpected bits of news, as in "You were there, too? That's so creepy!" or “Isn’t it creepy how she called at the last minute?” In a subsequent post, Liberman charted the similar taming of other formerly scary words, including:

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The History of Words—in 100 Words

We all love to make lists—from what we need “to do” to what we think of the world around us, it’s a nice device for encapsulating our collective knowledge and/or tastes on any of a wide range of subjects: “100 Most Popular Baby Names of the 1970s;” “Top 10 Blocking Tight Ends in the History of the Green Bay Packers;” “Best Pizza Places in Connecticut and/or Rhode Island, 2007.” The list—er, lists—go on. Nothing seems unlistable.

But, what about trying to capture the entire development of the English language—now peaking at some two billion speakers worldwide and a lexicon of more than a million words (including dialects and technical terms)? And what about doing so with a list of, say, fewer words than it’s taken to compose this post so far…

David Crystal, a North Wales-based linguist and scholar of the English language has taken it upon himself to pick out the hundred words that tell the story of the mother tongue since the Anglo-Saxons first arrived on the British Isles and started writing it down some 1,562 years ago. And while Americans love to make books full of lists, it seems somehow so much more British to take one list and expand it out into a book. Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words is really 100 chapters—one per word—covering more than 250 pages. But for a system of communication in its 16^th and most prolific century as a written language, that’s pretty concise. (It won’t be available in the U.S. until 2012, but your favorite British bookseller or Amazon UK will be happy to “despatch” you a copy for a few quid.)

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Intelligible player downfield...

Thankfully, now that the NFL lockout is over, we can get back to hearing SAT words being used properly and effectively. At least in certain cases. Today, there's this dispatch, on new Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Nnamdi Asomugha, from the Reading Eagle:*

"There was a market out there with numbers that the media assumed I wanted," Asomugha said. " It's funny, you know, you don't pay as much attention to it because everything happened so fast, but you heard the apocryphal stories about the things that I'm expecting as far as numbers."

Apocryphal. I had to check my tape recorder to make sure that's what he said. Then I looked it up to make sure again.

A star on the field, his vocabulary is apparently at an All-Pro level, too.

*I know, I know. For the record, that's the Reading Eagle, a newspaper from the town in Pennsylvania, not the "reading Eagle," as in "a Philadelphia pro football player who can see and comprehend written material"—though either, ahem, reading would be perfectly understandable here.

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The secret to eternal life

It's a bit cliched to say that a picture is worth a thousand words (well, that is a cliche), but there is some degree of truth to it. And so when the attempt is made to translate a picture—such as, say, a Chinese character—into one word or even a handful of words, the accuracy of the intended idea can be questionable. But the result can be magical.

I had the good fortune to travel in China last year, and jotted this down in my notes:

Seen, on a sign at the entrance to a hiking park near Yangshuo: The itinerary of Immortal, a list of directives which includes, “It is not to climbing on the bad thunderstorming days.”

It’s the little things that matter. As many people of distinguished age will tell you, the secret to long life really is a series of small insights, day in and day out. You can smoke until you’re 90, eat fatty foods until you’re 100, but… be sure to find the joy in each moment; never turn down a friend or loved one in need; and, no matter what others may want you to do, it is not to climbing on the bad thunderstorming days.



Every word, a fugitive

While kicking around ideas to post on this Word Journal, I remembered an article I wrote a few years ago for Humanities magazine—perhaps because the piece ran under the headline Words, Words, Words. It was the story of a new scholarly edition of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, considered the first authoritative work of its kind when it was initially printed in 1755. That's not very long ago, in the history of the English language. It's amazing to think that before then, there wasn't one single source for English speakers to consult (whereas Spanish and French speakers had long had such books, a shameful fact to the British publishers who recruited Johnson). Forget dictionary.com. There wasn't even a dictionary.

The most interesting irony is that the act of creating an authoritative word glossary only revealed the democratic, evolutionary nature of the language. Words don't respond well to authority. To quote my own article, if I may:

By his own admission, Johnson set out to "fix" the language, to stabilize it, and in so doing, save it from those who would erode it by using it--a mission in line with "Dr. Johnson's" rigid reputation. "People still like to think of Johnson as a dictator of language," DeMaria says. "And in the dictionary, you can point to evidence of that." For example, in a comparison of the words "later" and "latter," Johnson declares that the, well, latter of the two is "only used by barbarians."

Yet in the end (that is to say, in the Preface), Johnson came to respect the common usage of words, admitting that language can no more be fixed than "the image of a grove in a rainstorm." He resigned himself, in this case not unhappily, to the task of "registering" the language, capturing it as it was. "He was quite struck with the variety, the illusiveness, and the liquidity of language, its fugitive qualities," DeMaria explains.

Samuel Johnson, WTF?Fugitive qualities, eh? Sometimes, it seems like more and more words are going into hiding ("k, c u there, ttyl!"). For those of us who work with words (and especially weirdos like me who insist on proper spelling and punctuation even in a casual email--an email!), it can be a bit frustrating. But it isn't just barbarians who are to blame texting and tweeting, and even 140 characters are plenty when used properly. Our language is an everyday glimpse of who we are and who we are becoming ("image of a grove in a rainstorm," meet UrbanDictionary.com). It was nice to be reminded that even this guy (right) got with the times (albeit the mid-18th century) and learned to love—and respect—the language as we know it, and as we use it.