Those critics who spurn negative concord insist on seeing snaggly illogic where the rest of the world sees nothing more pernicious than emphasis. Moving on from this, it should surprise no one to discover that in English there are other forms of emphasis—or what the naysayers will insist on thinking of as overemphasis—that provoke grief and finger-wagging. This brings us conveniently to a topic known to linguists as ‘word inflation’.
There are various ways in which a bit of lexical oomph can be added to our regular vocabulary. The impulse to beef up a word by sticking on a prefix and interpreting it as an intensifier (‘morphemic pleonasm’) is one that inspires considerable scorn among those who care about such things. The Economist Style Guide remarks that ‘Pre-prepared just means prepared ’—as others grumble that preplanned just means ‘planned’. Brilliantly, The Economist also rules against skyrocket as being both ‘unnecessarily long’ and, worse, American. (It also dislikes proactive. This is ‘Not a pretty word’, it says, ‘try active’.) In similar style, Bill Bryson dismisses co-equal as ‘fatuous’, before going on to suggest that the pre- of precondition ‘should be deleted’. But if so—if precondition should be chopped down to size—what, you might wonder, of predominate? Is this word ‘unnecessarily long’—try dominate? Should the front ends not also be deleted from prerequisite and despoil? And ought not the gripers to have been resisting overwhelm long before the world came up with underwhelm (the verb whelm without the over meaning ‘overturn’, so that overwhelm could be interpreted as meaning ‘over-overturn’, or, of all things, metaphorically, ‘put to rights’)? Before the 1930s, twined was more popular than intertwined. Which version of the word would the average griper reach for now? And what of intermingle? Is intermingle really more minglesome than mingle on its own? Your mind may have started to spin, but warned is armed: do not ask these questions of the gripers. If you try it, you will cause them to up the stakes further.
Flyweight huffers and puffers might stumble over an argument about intermingle or despoil, but the purest purist will immediately come back at you with the use of epicentre as a supercharged version of centre. Epicentre, this person will explain wearyingly, is drawn from the terminology of the earthquake and kindred phenomena, whose centre, main event or ‘focus’ occurs under a surface: ‘epicentre’ is the technical name for the point on the surface immediately above the focus. To any such explanation you must reply that enormous numbers of people find this distinction of absolutely no interest whatsoever, and that, like it or not, epicentre now also means the ‘really really central centre’.** At this, the griper, teeth gritted, is likely to up the ante once again by pointing to the ignorant boosterism of using penultimate to mean, not ‘the one before last’, but something along the lines of ‘super-ultimate’—as it does in the following generous comment, which describes a certain book as having ‘gone deeply into the understanding of human behavior and what is really needed to enhance our personalities and achieve penultimate success’; or as it does in a work discussing the idea that ‘The penultimate or peak in the psychopathological process of the suicide bomber is the choice to activate the choice to die and kill’.** While you struggle with this, your griper will probably already be moving on to the word precautious. Sometimes it is used with reference to the taking of precautions; but it is also currently at risk of meaning ‘very very cautious’—and either way, it is bound to be classed as vile. What, your sarcastic friend will ask, does Clarence Talley mean by his ‘golden nugget of wisdom’ that, ‘With the poor still among us in this twenty-first century, we should be extra precautious about leftovers’?** What was Gertrude Stein on about, a hundred years earlier, when she wrote in ‘Portrait of Prince B. D.’: ‘The change is not present and the sensible way to have agony is not precautious’?
Having replied to these challenges with no more than a mysterious smile, you may well be reflecting that every last part of the griper’s tirade can be taken as evidence of the fact that from time to time we (‘we’ broadly speaking) like to give a word a bit of a lift. Mania, for example, was perfectly serviceable for about 450 years. Then all of a sudden: megalomania. In Christian Work, 1 February 1867, in an account of a thieving vicar, the then-new form of the word is offered up with a touch of disdain. The cleric’s defence in court of insanity, ‘or megalomania, as it was called’, seems not to have been supported by any evidence other than that of the crime itself. Yet by 1900, the megalomaniac was everywhere. Omnishambles, a coinage of 2012, entered common parlance with even greater speed. Then again, though omnishambles may currently convey something more shambolic than a humble shambles, it is perfectly possible that before too long there will be little to choose between the naked word—if it even survives—and the accessorised version.
Dressing up a perfectly good word with a needless prefix, as the griper might see it, is easy enough. Even easier is to drag strong terms away from their literal or customary context so as to exploit the hyperbolic qualities they then impart elsewhere. But this effect can be short-lived. Poor stratospheric has been lowered, wretched abysmal has been raised and cataclysmic, ‘in the manner of a mighty flood’, now mops up after workaday exaggerations. In a Telegraph sports report, what is referred to first as a referee’s ‘high-profile error’ becomes, later in the article, a ‘cataclysmic cock-up’: the person who clings to a traditional understanding of cataclysms will hardly know where to look.
The rhetorical value of restraint may appeal to some: ‘here goes nothing’, as computer gamers mutter when they are about to attempt an insanely difficult move. And with a formula of this kind, the currency should remain reasonably stable. But hyperbole is different. Adjectives especially—a wicked, an epic—are wont to crash on the sandbanks of emphasis, only to retreat with a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. From around 1400, and for centuries afterwards, the word unspeakable was used to denote religious ineffability. But with the ascent of Queen Victoria to the throne, it was toppled, and became in particular an insult used by snobs who wished to dismiss this or that as indescribably unimpressive. Even now, a person reading in the Authorized Version of the Bible ‘Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift’ (2 Cor. ix. 15) may find it necessary to edit away the sudden picture of God as some ghastly parvenu who has given china wall-ducks as a wedding present.** Awful, which for centuries meant ‘awe-inspiring’, suffered the same fate as unspeakable, and at more or less the same time; by the 1940s, Ivor Brown, in A Word in Your Ear, was willing to declare that ‘no word’ had been ‘more foully mishandled’ (the downfall of awesome was yet to come). As for the use of literally to mean, not literally ‘literally’, but figuratively ‘figuratively’—or not even that: its use merely as an intensifier—the ink wasted decrying this shift would be enough to make a squid despair.**
The dwindling of the rhetorical force (the ‘semantic bleaching’) of such words as epic, abysmal and awesome mirrors the fate of many stock phrases that use repetition for emphasis. A rush of negatives is by no means the only way that this is achieved. For starters, there are numerous standard pairs in English, the stagey lo and behold, the strategic all well and good, but …, the teasing maybe, maybe not.** Expressions of this kind can become so deeply embedded in the language that their duplicate nature rarely strikes us; and if it ever does, they probably still feel right and proper, and we happily pass on by. There are also single-word examples of this doubling. Consider haphazard. Hazard is a word of Arabic origin meaning ‘chance’. Hap, as in perhaps or happen, originally Scandinavian, also means ‘chance’. Thus one might argue that haphazard could as well be ‘haphap’ or ‘hazardhazard’. The word forefront is, for complicated reasons, almost the same. In its earliest use, fore meant ‘front’ and front meant ‘face’. The two were put together to allow for discussion of the ‘front face’ of a building—as opposed to its ‘back face’ or indeed its ‘back front’, or, in current architectural parlance, ‘rear elevation’. Now, however, forefront essentially means ‘front front’. Thus ‘X is at the forefront of efforts to do Y’ could perfectly well be reworded ‘X fronts efforts to do Y’ or ‘X is at the fore in efforts to do Y’. Does anyone care about the redundancy built into haphazard or forefront? Not for the first time: no.
Despite the many doubled uses that the gripers accept, they believe they find redundancy idiotic, flinging about such dismissive labels as tautological, pleonastic and prolix. They may allow the odd over and above to pass without remark, but reject a ‘positive role model’, ‘free gifts’, anything ‘times tenfold’, and a ‘self-confessed’ anybody. Bill Bryson gets going on old adage, ‘An adage is by definition old’; first conceived, ‘Delete “first” ’; from whence, ‘Whence means “from where” ’; and so on. Present the grumblers with workable solutions, and they will wonder about your views on unworkable ones.** Remind them to take their personal belongings as they leave a Tube carriage, and they will try to imagine what their impersonal belongings might be. (And if the answer that suggests itself to them is their casual litter—spent chewing gum; scrunched up shopping lists and receipts—they will then wonder waspishly, is it acceptable to leave such stuff behind?)
You probably already dot your English with a selection of these ready-made redundancies. But in a campaign to expand the range of Good English, that is not quite enough. You need to understand that the gripers see beyond this, and are also permanently poised to pounce on more drawn-out examples—those that qualify for the label ‘syntactic pleonasm’. Who among us is at all times and for ever above the odd spot of excitable excess? Mr Bryson himself fires a piece of advice at his readers curiously worded thus: ‘On the whole, however, the use of more words than necessary is almost always better avoided’. Is he joking? It is hard to know what ‘almost always’ contributes to his remark that ‘On the whole’ has failed to establish. A favourite—which is to say widely derided—form of syntactic pleonasm is any such pile-up that includes the word both. In British Enterprise Beyond the Seas, 1867, where J. H. Fyfe discusses the different challenges facing shepherds and stockmen in ‘Our Antipodes’, he writes, ‘There are, however, two grave dangers which both share in common’. The sneery rejoinder here would be: why not simply, ‘There are, however, two grave dangers facing both’?** Another favourite pile-up can be dated at least as far back as an 1878 report by the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture: ‘the reason why is because the price of labor, taxes and farming tools are so high’. ‘The reason is X’? ‘Why this is, is X’? ‘This is because X’? (The price is?) More unusual examples also sometimes jump out. In 1917, the Columbia professor Calvin Thomas wrote, about training novelists within universities, ‘all the criticism and historical scrutiny and professorial opinionation will do the aspirant no harm if he has a rugged individuality of his own’.** Acidly the griper will wonder quite how an aspirant could ever be conceived of as having the rugged individuality of somebody else.
Some of the more popular forms of pleonasm come across as shameless noise, not least a tag like ‘Save up to 70% off’, where the first word and the last are seemingly doing the same job. Others appear more calculating. Beauty companies, to avoid blunt untruth, often resort in their advertising copy to pleonastic assertions that are hard to unscramble, as for instance in this strapline from the cosmetics company Lancôme: ‘Wrinkles appear visibly reduced’. The thought of X merely ‘appearing’ to be visibly Y is hard to fix in one’s mind. What is being promised here? Impossible quite to say.
In C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words, he defines ‘verbicide’ as ‘the murder of a word’. The offence happens, he says, ‘in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for “very”, tremendous for “great”, sadism for “cruelty”, and unthinkable for “undesirable”** were verbicides’.** One might respond to this that if the senses of the words Lewis regretted really were dead and gone, at least the lexical corpses left behind in this process were successfully zombified—back up out of their graves at once, if they were ever in them, and pumped with the lifeblood of new meaning. How does this stack up against the efforts of the gripers to annihilate what they consider nasty neologisms?
Many hundreds of years ago, in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer pointed out that words prized in the past can come to seem ‘nyce and straunge’, and yet, he added, the fact is ‘thei spake hem so’. They did indeed; and much of Chaucer’s own vocabulary is now of course nice and strange to us in turn—for example, he used nyce to mean ‘rare’. Nobody knows what the tides of future language change will bring, nor what they will take away. But change itself is certain. Do not be cowed by the violent talk of the gripers; and especially, do not be too precautious in the face of their verbicidal instincts. They may firefight** ‘barbarous vocables’, but if it suits you, and as long as these words still have their dash of power, why should your language not be skyrocketty, incredible, awesome?