on faddish verbal affectations in academia

Let me preface this post by reminding everyone that I have no time for language “purists,” since they are generally just snobs. Language lives and evolves and takes risks.

However, some experiments with language are bold and energetic, while others are just tiresome affectations, and some of these sweep through academia like flu viruses from time to time.

During the 1990’s, it suddenly seemed like no one in academia was allowed to use the word “reluctant” anymore. It had to be “reticent”; every sophisticated academic under a certain age was suddenly saying “reticent” in every case where “reluctant” would have done a sufficiently competent job.

Now, I understand that “reticent” in that case isn’t incorrect. “Showing reluctance” is usually dictionary definition #2 for “reticent”. But why do that to the language? “Reluctant” is a perfectly good word, and “reticent” under definition #1, meaning “given to infrequent speech”, is a different concept that deserves to keep the word for itself.

The new affectation, which annoys me terribly, is the recent onslaught of people using “rehearse” to mean “recount”. As in, “I will not rehearse the whole of Descartes’ argument here.” (Also, it always seems to be in the negative. I’ve never heard anyone say: “I will now rehearse Descartes’ whole argument.”)

Here again, I suppose it’s not technically incorrect. The last dictionary I consulted about this annoyance listed “to recount” as definition #3 for “rehearse”.

But– why do it? It sounds like an affectation. If you use “rehearse” in the normal musical/theatrical sense then it has a certain metaphorical power for academic purposes. For instance: “Heidegger’s 1919 War Emergency Semester can in many ways already be viewed as a rehearsal for Being and Time.” That has a bit of punch to it. But “rehearse” to mean “recapitulate” is simply an unnecessary bit of minor cleverness that weakens the language rather than strengthening it. Please don’t do it.

Sometimes these affectations catch on permanently, and the war is no longer worth fighting. “Oxymoron” is one example I can think of. It used to be OK to say things like “a contradiction in terms”, but now “oxymoron” has been established as the normal term throughout the populace as a whole, so it’s no longer really even an affectation. But it made me cringe in the same way as “rehearse” when it first entered widespread use, late in my high school years.

Apparently the word “graffiti” was once an affectation of this sort, though it evolved into the normal term well before I was born. The reason I think this is because Raymond Chandler, whose literary judgment I trust a great deal, once wrote a disgusted complaint about pretentious detective writers who use “graffiti” to refer to scrawls in a public toilet. Well, we no longer know what else to call it, or at least I don’t, having learned to call it graffiti from earliest childhood. Sometimes the affectations win, and you just have to go along with them. But I hope “rehearse” is a temporary glitch.

Also, there are certain people who always seem to be the first to adopt and then drop these affectations. I have a couple of fringe acquaintances like that, and whenever I hear them use a word in a slightly off-key way, then I know the fad is coming. Just as there were certain people in Chicago who always seemed to move to neighborhoods that then became “hip” a couple of months later, at which point they would move to the future cutting-edge neighborhood. Not sure how they did it.