Henrietta Hay's Column

From time to time I feel compelled to comment on the very odd things we Americans do to the English language -- some of them accidental and some of them deliberate. Certainly language changes, but all too often clarity of expression has been replaced by obfuscation! I sometimes wonder what the most ferocious college English teacher any freshman ever had, the one who pounded the rules of grammar into my poor head, would think of today's new speak.

It's easy to blame technology, with new words like byte and cyberspace and Internet and RAM. But mostly we just like to mess around with the old familiar words.

Two of my favorite philosophers, Calvin and Hobbes, aired an opinion on this subject when Calvin said, "I like to verb words." "What?" asked Hobbes. "I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when 'access' was a thing. Now it's something you do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language." Hobbes had the last word, as he often does. "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding."

We're working on it. Most of the new speak is funny if you don't take it too seriously. The speakers at a workshop in Texas were being more fuzzy and boring and usual, when some bright protester suggested that they "disambiguate." From NASA came this gem. "NASA tries to answer the question of how we can live and work together without the sardineization of Earth's most populated cities."

Along with verbing, we are doing a lot of "adjectiving" (trying to see how many words we can string together to form an adjective) and "izing." A Labor Department memo speaks of a "strong promotion from within" policy. And an English newspaper said that Margaret Thatcher peripheralized Europe. To prioritize these quotes, there was the insurance adjuster who wrote, "I request that you let me statementize your client."

Puns have always been an integral part of the language. My favorite punster was Librarian George VanCamp, but my son Dave comes a close second. One day he asked me whether I had heard that the Origami Society is folding. He was the one who spent a lot of time sitting on the steps of the New York Public Library reading between the lions.