Hentrietta Hay's Column

Sometimes I think that if I had my college years to do over I would study etymology rather than economics. That's etymology as in words, not entomology as in bugs. The bugs I can live long and happily without, but words fascinate me. How did people start communicating with each other? I wonder whether the first verbal communication came when the first cave woman looked up from the fire at the cave man with the stone club and said, "Ugh", meaning, "Why don't you try for a mastodon today? The wooly mammoths are a little tough".

The need of human beings to communicate with each other is universal and the history of language is one of the most fascinating fields of knowledge. English is spoken by 358 million people. It is beautiful, expressive and highly flexible.

But for some mysterious reason, the English language is under siege today by what we might call "organizationeze", not unrelated to "pedagogese". We are inventing new words and new uses for words, not for clarity but for obfuscation. A living language is constantly growing and changing, of course, but the changes should make it easier to understand and more beautiful to listen to.

One thing that bothers me is the habit of changing the meanings and tenses and parts of speech of words, particularly creating verbs out of nouns. Verbs are the words that move an idea along. As Rita Mae Brown says, they blast you down the highway - or should. We are intent on detouring them.

Take my pet peeve, prioritize. To set priorities is concise and strong. You know what it means. To prioritize things is imprecise in meaning and lacks clarity. And to make it worse, the word is used as a verb, a noun and occasionally an adverb depending on the mood of the speaker. I am in the minority here, however, because prioritize is in the latest Webster's New World Dictionary, but as a verb only. Oh well, nobody's perfect.

Recently on late night talk radio I heard an ad for a savings account, which is collateralized. It is impossible to know whether the borrower or the lender furnished financial security for the loan, or just what was being sold.

But my nomination for first prize in the "creation of verbs" contest is capacitize. That one means, so far as I can tell, "to make an auditorium full!" - to capacity, that is - I think.

And then there are the pompous fuzzies.

Interface is a technical term used by scientists and computer nuts, but it is inaccurate when applied to people. People just meet, or talk or whatever. There is overview. Over what are we viewing? Irregardless adds nothing except two letters to regardless. End result makes one wonder about the beginning result.

I listened recently to a series of tapes on time management, which were generally very good. But the speaker kept saying that we should be proactive instead of reactive. There is no such word as proactive according to Webster. If there were, the prefix pro means means favoring the affirmative side, defending, supporting.

That would make proact mean defending action. Perhaps he meant we should act rather than react.

Recently I read a book review in which the reviewer liked the book but complained that the indexation was poor. So was the review.

What is called Watergate language has carried imprecision to new heights? Things like at this point in time, in the area of, stonewall, subject matter as opposed to subject, in the area of, in that time frame. That list goes on and on. These word uses do nothing but allow you to avoid saying what exactly what you mean.

I am no linguist and I certainly do not pretend to speak perfect English. I do, however, respect the language and I like to hear it spoken and written as accurately and concisely as it can be.

So let's prioritize our subject matter irregardless of the overview and proactively interface with our friends as we collateralize our risks in this time frame, and, as my Phoenix son says, boldly go where no language has ever gone before.