[A belated contribution to the late and lamented Word, originally posted 21 February 2007]
ur president—Mr. Stay-the-Course—is talking about a surge in
Iraq. The media, the pundits, whatever, have picked up that word and run with
it. Surge. What, if anything, do they mean by surge?
It’s a word I’ve had troubles with before. A century or so ago,
when I was in grade school, I remember having to use “surge” in a sentence. I
recalled the climax of Henry Kuttner's “What You Need”—when the anti-hero,
wearing the smooth-soled shoes given him by the proprietor of a mysterious
shop, can’t keep his footing in a crowd on a slippery platform, and falls in
front of a moving train. Remembering the scene I wrote, “There was a surge towards
the edge of the platform.” My teacher didn’t accept that as a legitimate use of
the word. I took my case to a higher authority—my mother—but she ruled that
while my sentence was perfectly correct, I had not demonstrated in it that I
actually understood the use of the word. Our definition had used the word
swelling, or something like that, and from my sentence it could have been
supposed that I thought that the platform was swollen at one edge.
Webster’s defines surge as a “violent rolling, sweeping, or
swelling motion,” among other things. My own feeling is that President
Stay-the-Course and the media celebrities trailing in his wake have failed to
demonstrate, at least as badly as I did, that they know the meaning of the
word. What we are talking about is the gradual introduction of twenty thousand,
or forty thousand, or whatever the real number is—not that we’ll ever be told—to Baghdad, to assist in trying to establish
order there. Not a surge. More like a seep, or an ooze, a trickle, or maybe a
creep. The thesaurus comes up with bleed as a possible synonym, grimly
appropriate, but not in the sense I had in mind.
Language change is eternal, or at least so the linguists seem
to think, but I feel that a kind of creeping obfuscation has grown up over our
language that obscures and defiles the sharp distinctions that should exist.
While the infer/imply debate seems to be a lost cause, to the impoverishment of the
English language, surely we can still resist new misuses of words, particularly
when important distinctions are lost. Parody
and burlesque, for example. What Liam
Lynch does is parody. What Weird Al
does is burlesque. There is a
difference, and calling burlesques parodies, and parodies also parodies, makes
the language less precise. Likewise, calling a ripple a surge seems to me to
blunt the instrument we communicate with, and perhaps we even think with, if
Dr. Watson and his followers are right.
Which brings me to the three Rs—Reduction, Redundancy, and
Redaction. All three of these words are under attack by creeping obfuscation.
Redaction has been confounded with Censorship, Redundancy with Joblessness, and
Reduction with Expansion.
Okay, reduction. How
on earth could anybody confuse reduction
and expansion? Are not increase and reduce opposites? Well, let’s take a look at the position of the
Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate on this word. The
APPCDC is a little-known outfit. The United States belongs to it, as well as
Australia, South Korea, India, Japan, and China. According to one writer it is
one of George Bush’s unsung triumphs. The APPCDC is promising to reduce
emissions of greenhouse gases by half by the end of the century. And this
without slowing the economy down or requiring any painful sacrifices by the
people of the world. Sound impossible? Well, actually, it is, at least by the
methods pursued by the APPCDC. The thing is, the APPCDC has its own private
definition of reduce. We usually
think of reduction as meaning
decreasing the amount of something. The APPCDC has its own notion. For it, reduce means increase at a lower rate of
speed. A scene from The Motor Chums in
Strange Waters may perhaps illustrate the point:
“Slow down,” shrieked Ben Hangdog wildly, as the car
increased its pace down the narrow country lane. “We’re going to crash!”
“Oh that’s impossible,” chuckled short Ned Eliot, “as
the piano tuner said of the twelve-inch pianist. Not with Tom Wilshire
driving.”
“In any case,” Harry Fletcher observed precisely, “Tom
is in fact slowing down.”
“How can that be?” inquired Ben Hangdog incredulously.
“The speedometer just rounded sixty.”
“As you just observed,” replied Harry, “It took Tom no
less than thirty-eight seconds to go from forty miles per hour to sixty.”
“So what?” screeched Ben. “We’re almost up to
sixty-five! The gear box will never stand it!”
“But it took him almost twelve seconds. At the present
rate we will only be at seventy-five when thirty-eight seconds have elapsed.
The car is thus slowing down.”
“You’re crazy,” muttered Ben nervously, reaching for the
door handle.
“No, it’s the simplest of simple math,” said Tom Wilshire
confidently.
Made redundant is
now a synonym for being without a job, redundancy
refers to joblessness, and the word
is a synonym for superfluous, even useless. This blunts the meaning. A
certain amount of redundancy is necessary in a system, to make it robust.
Redundancy refers to multiplication, not to necessity. We have perfectly good
words for the concept of lacking necessity—superfluous,
for one, and unnecessary, for
another. Gratuitous. Uncalled for. Unneeded. Unwanted. The
language itself uses redundancy as a device to counter noise, with such points
of grammar as agreement of subject and verb, or of adjective and noun. The fact
that the same information is delivered in more than one way is an example of
redundancy—but the redundancy is nonetheless necessary grammatically. Huge
systems (like the electrical grid that supplies the power we use to write and
read this very entry) are designed with a certain amount of necessary
redundancy in order to ensure that the failure of a part doesn’t mean the
failure of the whole.
Now the other day when I was watching TV, or at least I had it
on in the background, I heard a bit of dialog. The prosecution offered the
defense a copy of an avadavat. “The name of the witness has been redacted,”
protests the defense attorney. Redacted!
I believe the term she was looking for was removed,
or perhaps obliterated. The technical
term is censored. Redacting a
document does not mean censoring it—though censorship may well be one object of
a redaction. Redacting a document is editing it—creating a new edition, perhaps
to add material, perhaps to abridge it, perhaps to combine it with another
account of the same events. Redaction criticism examines such an edited
document, focusing on the differences between it and its source. This new and
perverse use of the word to mean censor
seems to me a kind of political correctness—censor
is a bad word, so we just say redact.
Never mind the damage done by this abuse of language.
