Revealing Language

We Americans think and talk big.

It is not unusual to see the word “myriad” used as an adjective, as in “today we have myriad ways to address climate change.”  During the final decade of my university teaching career, I also encountered the word “plethora” in many (but not a myriad of) student essays.

As a noun, myriad technically refers to the product of ten and one thousand or ten thousand. In its most common appearance as an adjective, however, it means “too numerous to be counted.”  The noun “plethora” can refer, according to my dictionary, to “a disease caused by an excess of blood cells.” The adjective, again it most common use in popular writing, is defined as “extreme excess” or “a state of being full.”

What does it say that these words are now being used in our everyday writing to describe something like unlimited expansion?  Does that say something about our current culture? 

Despite or perhaps because of the limitations we have/are experiencing in Coronaville, and in a nation whose legislators in Congress are either unable or unwilling to pass laws, we love to describe things as expansive, or unlimited.  Bigger is better, from our economic system—unregulated capitalism that relies on continuous growth—to our expectations of the future and our recent fascination with trips to Mars.

Even when we back away from words like plethora and myriad, we like to call things “mega,” “grand,” or “humongous”—all words that suggest large or unlimited size.

Why are we using such words of excess now, when simpler words like “more” or “many” or even “much more” served as adequate expressions of largeness for so many decades in the past history of the United States?

Susan, my friend the linguist, assures me that language is always in a state of change—and that this is normal, not a sign of degeneration as some of my grade school teachers thought.  I remember being told by one teacher: “They are children, not kids! Kids are baby goats!”

Yet I cannot help but wonder if changes in language do, at least partly, reflect a hardening or loss of respect in our culture.  Why, for example, has the “F-bomb” become so common in recent years?  And what about even simple acknowledgements like “thank you.”

 Some years ago, I came close to embarrassing members of my family when it first became common for servers in restaurants to say “no problem” instead of “thank you”, “don’t mention it”, or even “sure.”  I almost told a young server: “If I thought I would be a problem, I would not have come into your restaurant.”  I thought it but didn’t say it.

Political language has been part of this linguistic downturn.  Newt Gingrich, Republican majority leader during the Clinton presidency, instructed members of his caucus to think of Democrats as “enemies” rather than “opponents,” a term in long use in Congress. This contributed to the growing political polarization that we now see in Washington, D.C.

Changes in language like that do have an effect.  Words do matter. They can help us feel good or bad about ourselves and about others with whom we differ.  They can bring us together or spread us further apart.

 When progressives use phrases like “defund the police,” they reduce the chances that their opponents will be willing to work with them to change policing by turning some current police responsibilities over to social workers and others who are better equipped to handle them.  

Similarly, when conservatives continue to refer to all of the 2020 protesters as terrorists instead of distinguishing peaceful protest from those who engage in violence, they make it more difficult to deal with the real threat of domestic terrorism, which the FBI tells us is largely found on the right wing of the political spectrum.   

We use language which distorts the truth because we think it will “energize our base,” another use of language to normalize polarization when we should be deploring it and seeking to end it.         

Democracy can thrive only if we replace polemics with problem-solving.

But we would first have to want to solve our problems rather than using them to get re-elected.