Are You in Vogue?
Now let’s discuss the third category of abusage: vogue words. By “vogue words” I mean words that for some reason suddenly become fashionable, and that people use constantly without considering whether they have any useful purpose or force. Vogue words may be old or new, long or short, but the one thing they have in common is their popularity, which leads to their being worn out by “excessive and mechanical repetition,” as Wilson Follett puts it in Modern American Usage (1966). In short, vogue words are the words that lazy writers and speakers reach for when they are trying to sound intelligent and original but don’t have anything interesting to say.
As you may recall from my tirade in Level 5, unique is a prime example of a vogue word. Have you noticed how everything is “so very unique” these days? Apparently, the time has passed when something was just unusual or uncommon. To top it off, the precise meaning of unique is not simply “unusual” or “uncommon” but “one of a kind, matchless, without peer.” Once you know that, it doesn’t make sense to qualify unique with such words as very, most, or somewhat. How can something be very unique or somewhat unique if it already is peerless, one of a kind?
You may also recall, from the end of Level 6, my objurgation regarding the vogue word impact. In The Writer’s Art (1984), James J. Kilpatrick says impact has “fastened like fatty tissue to the arteries of our language.” He’s right. No longer can something have a plain effect; it must have a dull impact. No longer can we say that something influenced or affected us—the banal vogue demands we say it impacted us. In my vocabulary, your teeth or your bones can be impacted, wedged together; and an impact is a collision or violent blow. But those who follow the vogue have taken all the force out of this word and used it as a feeble substitute for influence or effect. Today we are bombarded with environmental impact studies, warnings about the impact of inflation, and vicissitudes that may adversely impact the stock market.
As if that’s not enough to make a verbally advantaged person contemplate the impact of a bullet on the brain, the impact virus now is mutating into even more pernicious forms! For example, I have come across the word impactful in print, in an ad for a laptop computer that said, “Presentations are impactful. Engaging. Impressive.”
Why did that tin-eared writer use impactful? What’s wrong with saying the presentations are engaging and impressive—or for that matter, effective, outstanding, striking, splendid, gripping, stunning, sensational, or electrifying? Why invent such an ugly word when so many attractive ones are available? Please, dear reader, for the health and welfare of the English language I implore you to abstain from using impact or any of its odious offspring.
Our next vile vogue word is viable. The precise meaning of viable is able to live, able to take root and grow, capable of independent existence, as a viable plant, a viable fetus, a viable culture, or a viable industry. Today, however, people are using viable to mean “possible, workable, doable.” When I hear about “viable plans” and “viable alternatives,” I wonder where they’re going to live, who’s going to put them up. If you want a fancy word for possible, try conceivable, and if you want a fancy word for workable or doable, try practicable—pronounced in four syllables: PRAK-ti-kuh-buul.
Next in the Top 40 of Vogue we have “The Ize Brothers”: maximize, finalize, prioritize, concretize, sensitize, optimize, secretize, incentivize, and many more awkward and pretentious verbs ending in -ize. In The Appropriate Word (1990), J. N. Hook notes that -ize is “an unbeautiful verb ending, often criticized by writers on usage, yet frequently necessary, as criticize itself illustrates.” In The Careful Writer, Theodore M. Bernstein wisely comments that the suffix -ize can either help the language grow in a wholesome way, or make it grow “stuffy and grotesque.”
Criticize, sterilize, socialize, and hospitalize are useful because they streamline expression. A coinage like incentivize is not only ugly and outlandish but also unnecessary, because the language already contains words that express its meaning, such as excite, encourage, and stimulate. Remember, if you hear a strange buzzing in your ears, watch out for a pompous and promiscuous use of the suffix -ize.
According to devotees of the vogue, people don’t talk, speak, or converse anymore. Instead they dialogue, as “We dialogued about it for an hour over lunch.” I’m sorry, but it’s high time to put a muzzle on that one. Other horrifying vogue words include interface, which should not be allowed to show its face outside of computer science; methodology used to mean method; decisioned used to mean decided; and proactive, which the dictionaries now tell us means “acting in anticipation” of something but which the voguesters in business and government all seem to use to mean either “acting to show that we’re acting” or “acting as if we know what we’re doing.”
The poet W. H. Auden once claimed that “nine-tenths of the population do not know what 30 percent of the words they use actually mean.” I would wager that most people use words like impact, prioritize, methodology, and proactive not because they’re trying to use the right word but because they’re trying to appear with it or smart. As H. W. Fowler remarks in his classic guide, Modern English Usage (1926), vogue words are “words owing their vogue to the joy of showing one has acquired them.”
Finally, there are the catch phrases that are so often repeated that they lose whatever shred of meaning or force they might have had. Think about how often you have heard—and perhaps used—these phrases: calculated risk, cautiously optimistic, credibility gap, communication gap, the bottom line, quantum leap, phase out, cutting edge, state of the art, meaningful dialogue, peer group, considered judgment, factors to be considered, decision-making process, learning experience, positive consequences, it remains to be seen, and in regard to—or worse, the illiterate in regards to.
Those are just a handful of the scores of fashionable but vapid or nebulous expressions that the careful writer and speaker rephrases or avoids. Keep your eyes and ears open, and whenever you suspect that a word or phrase is becoming weak from overwork, it’s a good bet that it’s been bitten by the vogue.
In The Writer’s Art (1984), columnist James J. Kilpatrick relates an anecdote about former secretary of commerce Malcolm Baldrige, who was so infuriated with the gobbledegook and doublespeak of the Washington bureaucracy that he issued a memo “demanding ‘short sentences and short words, with emphasis on plain English, using no more words than effective expression requires.’ Thus, for starters,” writes Kilpatrick, Baldrige “banned from departmental correspondence and papers such words as maximize, institutionalize, and interface,” along with such phrases as “bottom line and serious crisis and material enclosed herewith.” I can just see all the bureaucrats “interfacing” and “dialoguing” around the coffee maker, being “cautiously optimistic” about “maximizing” their “bottom line.” Somebody had to “impact” their “parameters,” right?
There are two lessons to be learned here: Look hard before you leap on the verbal bandwagon, and beware the ostentatious allure of the popular but enervated word. As Wilson Follett writes in Modern American Usage (1966), “When repeated use has worn down the novelty, the word we hear and the associations we sense are not what they were at first…. Skill in expression consists in nothing else than choosing the fittest among all possible words, idioms, and constructions.”
