The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (18 page)

My little rural Indian school in Indiana didn’t offer French, Spanish or German, but some of us took four years of Latin.

Jack E. Garrett

Monroe Township, New Jersey

Tim Groninger makes a classic error when he writes, “word thievery … has become especially acute,” suggesting that the problem has reached pandemic proportions.
Acute,
as in “acute appendicitis,” refers to suddenness of onset, not severity. We doctors note that word appropriation from medicine is a chronic condition.

Eric Flisser, MD

New York, New York

Your lead sentence should have read, “The specialists have been in open rebellion at the theft of their vocabularies.”

In his monumental
American Language,
Mencken, in Supplement One, cited the misappropriation of the word “engineer” by
Engineering News Record,
as follows: “The
Engineering News-Record,
the organ of the engineers, used to devote a column every week to uninvited invaders of the craft … One of its favorite exhibits was a bedding manufacturer who became the first mattress-engineer and then promoted himself to the lofty dignity of sleep-engineer. The hatching of bogus engineers still goes on.”

Displaying its sense of humor at the theft of its craft, Mencken offered this: The rat, cockroach and bedbug eradicators of the country had for years an organization called the American Society of Exterminating Engineers. On November 8, 1923, the
News-Record
reported that one of its members followed the sideline of mortician in Bristol, PA, and suggested sportively: “That’s service for you. Kill ’em and bury ’em for the same fee.”

EN-R
’s umbrage is not quite on the target of your fulminators, but close enough.

Dick McQuillen

New York, New York

Is it okay with paleontologists if language
evolves
?

Fred Rosenthal

Marblehead, Massachusetts

The term “lesion” is rarely used by lay people, but I’ve seen it used often by science writers. It is almost universally used incorrectly. As an example, in an article on foot-and-mouth disease this sentence appears: “Foot and mouth disease is a viral infection that causes fever, blisters and lesions, and results in weight loss and a reduction in milk production” (
The New York Times Magazine,
April 6). The word
lesion,
from the Latin for “injury,” is used very generally by physicians. It is used to refer to any abnormal condition of the body. Thus a blister is often a lesion, but so is weight loss, and so is reduction in milk production. Because it is a general term, it is often used to refer to an abnormality that has been described but does not fit a defined category. In the phrase I quote, the implication is that a lesion is a clearly defined entity like a blister. It is an impressive-sounding word, but it seems to carry no meaning when used by science writers.

Paul Cunningham, MD

Tacoma, Washington

Please tell your editors that “methodology” is not a fancy word for method, nor is it a word for fancy method. To quote Evans and Evans, “The use of the word ‘methodology’ for ‘method’ is common among social scientists, many of whom seem to have a great love for redundant syllables.”

And please tell them that the misuse of “parameter” is simply a display of ignorance of mathematics.

David Fax

Canton, Massachusetts

Chemists think of an “organized body” as an animal or a plant containing compounds derived from hydrocarbons. Hah, hah, hah!!! The word “organized” has no relationship to “organic” as used in “organic chemistry.” Bill, you don’t make me fulminate, you make me laugh. By the way, fulmination is an example of a word derived from a scientific word and now perfectly accepted in non-scientific discourse (without objections from chemists, purists and non-purists). Often, technicians working with scientists will initiate “corruptions” of the original word.

Jock Nicholson

San Diego, California

Should meteorologists fulminate? Fulmen is, after all, a visual rather than sonic display, and experts who study atmospheric conditions in order to forecast the weather are not often concerned with meteors. When did those usages become acceptable?

I especially appreciate your mentioning my pet peeve, popular misuse of the term “exponential.” Without fulminating, I try to point out that the exponential function can take a zero, negative, or even imaginary, argument: radioactive decay, which models “shrinkage,” is a valid instance of a rate of change proportional to size.

Noel M. Edelson

New Rochelle, New York

You do exactly what you were writing about regarding stolen meanings.
Yoga
is a Sanskrit word meaning union, from which the English word
yoke
is derived. Yoga, or more properly, Raja Yoga is a spiritual path toward enlightenment. Yoga refers to union with all, in the sense of the Divine or Universe or some equivalent.

One of the many steps is named Asana, meaning posture. This is what you and most people think is yoga. It is not. Please call it Asana Yoga, although what you describe as a rooster position is very far removed from Yoga.

The so-called Yoga classes offered in the U.S. and elsewhere are physical exercise classes—nothing more. Another case of stolen meaning.

Gerry Dorman

Lindenhurst, New York

Scientists themselves are the guiltiest of “word robbery.” They typically assign very specific meanings to such common, broad terms as “frequency,” “wave,” “tolerance,” “elastic” and “resonance,” thus confusing the heck out of the rest of us.

If they pay attention to CONTEXT, these erudite complainers will find that their understanding of everyday English will grow exponentially.

Peggy Troupin, PhD

New York, New York

You report that Prof. Tobin of Tufts University (where I once was an undergraduate) is not offended by the use of “quantum” to mean “sudden,” provided we don’t use it to mean “huge.” But of course that is what is usually implied by the term in general parlance. Prof. Tobin knows how very small a quantum is; it equals the frequency of radiant energy multiplied by Planck’s constant, which is 6.25 x 10
^-27
, or 0.00000000000000000000000000625, that’s 26 zeros after the decimal point. Used correctly, a quantum leap is a change SO tiny as to be undetected by unaided human senses.

Curt W. Beck

Professor of Chemistry

Vassar College

Pleasant Valley, New York

One of the most flagrant thefts from specialists’ vocabularies is
orchestration.
I am a composer and I actually have orchestrated a quantity of music, some of which has been performed by major orchestras.

But over the past twenty years or so I have heard the word used in absurd contexts such as: this or that CEO “splendidly orchestrated an international trade agreement with China.” Or, a U.S. secretary of state “has made great strides in orchestrating peace in the Middle East.” Or a university president “orchestrated an effective fund drive for the endowment.”

Usually it is an authority figure who orchestrates and I think this comes from the mistaken idea that the supreme authority figure of the symphony orchestra, the conductor, is “orchestrating” when he or she conducts a work—pointing commandingly to this or that instrument or section of the orchestra. Often conducting from memory, he is viewed as a genius and a great leader. From this comes the metaphor of a great leader (of anything) “orchestrating” rather than simply planning.

But it is a bad metaphor, for in most cases the conductor is leading the orchestra in a work that has been orchestrated by someone else, usually the composer. The exceptions are composer/conductors such as Gustav Mahler, who conducted many of his own symphonies with the New York Philharmonic, or film composers such as John Williams who frequently conduct their own film scores.

Ravel really did orchestrate Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition,
but as far as I know, Henry Kissinger, William Silber or Bill Gates never orchestrated a thing.

John D. White

Evergreen, Colorado

Exponential growth refers to growth conforming to an exponent, e.g., the accumulation achieved by squaring the number 2, then squaring that accumulation, etc. If the exponent is a positive number above 1, the rate of rise of the accumulation does indeed become rapid in time. Plotted out on semi-logarithmic graph paper, exponential growth results in a straight line. Plotted out on graph paper, exponential growth is parabolic.

Your savings account grows arithmetically, unless your bank is unique, as does our economy when growing at 0.1 percent a year.

Kai Kristensen, MA

La Jolla, California

Fulminations II.
When a word with a clear meaning in a specialized field like science, math or music crosses over into the general language, its meaning can get twisted. This infuriates the specialists, who see it not merely as a form of linguistic corruption but also as highway robbery from their vocabulary. Examples:

Physicists cannot string together a theory to explain why
quantum jump,
which in their world means “a sudden alteration in an atom’s energy,” and is therefore exceedingly small, has leapt into general public usage with the meaning of “huge change.”

Psychiatrists can be seen to approach hysteria when
schizophrenia,
a psychosis often characterized by withdrawal and hallucinations, is bandied about by a public that thinks it means “split personality” and uses
schizoid
to describe any duality.

Neuroscientists wince at the way
congenital,
which to them means “inborn; existing at birth,” is stretched by vituperative columnists to a more general “habitual, chronic.”

Mathematicians cannot calculate why their
parameter,
“a variable constant used to determine other variables,” is confused by laypeople with the quite different
perimeter
and has now adopted the second word’s meaning of “limits” or “characteristics.”

And musicians note the way
crescendo,
which to them means “a gradual increase in volume,” has been seized by nonmusicians to mean “climax”—not the reaching but the reached.

A “crescendo” is not a peak of sound, or a sudden outburst, but a gradual increase in volume. Loudness is not even necessarily implied; Tchaikovsky, for example, goes so far as to indicate a crescendo from ppppp to pppp. Also, “staccato” does not mean rapid, cf. the opening of
In the Hall of the Mountain King
from Grieg’s music to
Peer Gynt.

Worse, though, is the appropriation of “orchestration,” to mean any kind of arrangement or planning. I’ve done orchestration and taught it, and I know it to be a complex technical subject. I don’t mind so much hearing about President Bush “orchestrating” a deal with Senate Democrats, but when Dr. Laura Schlessinger thanks her DJ for “orchestrating our music,” I experience a crescendo in my blood pressure and accelerando in my heart rate.

James Redding

Granville, New York

Fulminations III.
If the issue I raise today cries out for an answer, if the point of this article invites close cross-examination, am I
begging the question?

No. Though my trickle-down convictions may beggar my neighbor, I will not
beg the question,
because I am not in the fallacy dodge. Of the many fulminations from specialists about the distortions of their vocabularies by the lay public, this mendicant phrase leads all the rest.

Here’s how it is mistakenly used: Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, noted that a downturn in the economy would reduce tax revenues and said: “So it
begs the question,
how large the tax cut? And it
begs the question,
how long the tax cut?”

“As a retired teacher of logic,” writes Daniel Merrill, who taught philosophy at Oberlin College, “I implore you: give the technical use of
beg the question
back to the logicians!”

A Rutgers University philosophy professor, Tim Mauldin, agrees: “Let’s stomp out this abuse!” He explains: “If the defender of the thesis asks (‘begs’) that his interlocutor accept as a premise of the argument the very issue in dispute (‘the question’), then he or she has
begged the question
. This error is sometimes called ‘circular reasoning.’”