Banishing words and the Descent into Barbarism

Marking student assignments has been part of my routine for more than two decades now. Every time I mark a set of essays, I offer them comments on their use of the language. I write the words “diction” or “usage” or “word choice” next to many of the words they use, such as  relatable, resilient, symbolic, or utilize. Last year, I got so tired of telling students to take care with word choice and diction that I created a list of words I wanted them to banish from their lexicon. It only partly seemed to work.

After posting my initial list of banished words to my classes, I kept adding more; then I began including phrases, such as delves into, or shines light on. Many of the words on my list are probably inoffensive enough, but as a teacher, I’m allowed to tell my students which words and phrases I think they should avoid; and as a writer, I’m certainly allowed to hate particular words and never use them in my own writing or speech.

Here are three examples of words I never use in my own writing, which are words I also encourage my students to avoid.

Relatable

I dislike this word. I don’t use it, and I always tell my students to delete it from their assignments. Students pick up words from various places, chiefly social media, but I don’t fault them for the words they use—I just try to correct them.

The word relatable is a useless word. It’s vague and abstract and mostly suggests a fuzzy emotional connection to an object or idea. Again, this word is always and forever vague.

Resilient

This word has become a buzzword in the last few years. I find it everywhere, not just in my own students’ writing. It’s used so often it’s losing it’s meaning entirely. It was a perfectly good word at one point—now it’s one I avoid altogether.

I remember after the Stephany Meyer craze, when it seemed like everyone was reading the Twilight books or watching the films, my daughter sat looking out the front window, just after the sun had set. The sky had taken on that in between quality—the light of the sun lingering in the west while the sky overhead darkened to a deep, indigo blue.

“She ruined a perfectly good word,” my daughter said.

She was of course referring to the word twilight. And it’s true; I can barely bring myself to use the word anymore.

Wordsmith

Here’s a word that really gets me. I can feel myself getting bothered every time I hear it. It’s a mixed metaphor, a euphemism, and a pretentious way to describe the process of editing and revising.

And what bothers me even more is that I hear this word from people who should know better. I hear it from academics-and I think only academics. Go figure.

So academics don’t write? They wordsmith? I don’t think I know what that process looks like.

I met a blacksmith once. He worked at Fort Edmonton Park where my kids and I volunteered for a couple of summers—a beautiful park along the river valley that contains re-creations of the old fort and town. This guy was also a volunteer, and he worked as a blacksmith in the fort. He would spend his time making small objects at his forge to show guests how a smith from the period would work. He even made rings out of iron nails for each of my daughters.

I think a working blacksmith might take offense at an academic calling themselves a wordsmith. Writing can be excruciating, exasperating, and time consuming. But when I sit down to write, I’m not dealing with a fire hot enough to melt iron or using tongs to pick up glowing metal horseshoes.

At the university where I teach, students need to take six credits of first-year English, one of which is a course in academic writing. If you attend university, then academic writing is something you want to learn. But academic writing is one type of writing, and it’s confined to one particular place and context—that being the university. But like every other kind of writing, academic writing is writing, not wordsmithing.

Some of the best advice on writing I’ve read comes from George Orwell. in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell describes the relationship between political systems and what he calls the decline of the English language:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

Orwell devotes much of his essay to the relationship between politics and language, but he also offers some basic rules about writing that haven’t lost their potency since the essay was first published in 1946:

i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

I return to Orwell’s list of rules periodically and remind myself to put them into practice. Rule six is my favourite. And I’ve given these rules to my students more  than once.

I teach my students academic writing, but I’m mostly teaching them about audience and how to organize their ideas. We talk about appropriate levels of diction, word choice, and how to incorporate quotations into their work, but they  need to understand audience, and they need to understand that many situations they encounter will require them to write differently. But in every situation, Orwell’s rules still apply.

As the instructor, I get to tell my students which words to use and which to avoid. It’s sometimes arbitrary, which I admit, but I’m also trying to make them better and clearer communicators. Clear speech and clear language means avoiding meaningless, overused, or cliched words and phrases, like relatable and resilient. As for wordsmith, I sincerely hope I never encounter a student using this term. I may just have to despair at the descent into barbarism.