As a linguist, I understand that language shifts and changes. The voiced z sound of houses is being replaced by an unvoiced s sound. The abbreviation A.I. has become a verb, as in “He A.I.ed it.” Neologisms abound, tracked by the American Dialect Society, and new words often make us think of things in new ways.
But I don’t adopt all of the changes. I still say houses with a z. I avoid some new words that seem too flash-in-the-pan (like cheugy and delulu). By the time I might begin using them, they are probably already on their way out. Other neologisms are a bit too clunky for everyday use, like enshittification, or too far removed from my experiences, like stan, or too self-consciously fashionable for my taste, like cray and rizz (the Oxford Word of the Year in 2023). Some bits of neology, I used ironically at first, but soon found myself adopting as part of my everyday vocabulary, like adverbial because or receipts to mean proof. Still, there are some usages that I can’t quite bring myself to embrace.
One is iconic. Everywhere I turn, I hear something described as the most iconic: movies, songs, sports figures, fictional characters, vehicles, photographs. Iconic has shifted to mean “famous.” My experience with the word comes from the semiotic triad of icon, index, and symbol, three of the 66 categories of signs proposed by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. There is also the historical use of the term to refer to religious artworks in Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. For me, icons are visual representations: they resemble something. Dictionaries have now added definitions like “widely recognized and well-established” or “widely known and acknowledged especially for distinctive excellence.” Iconic has widened its meaning, but I haven’t come along.
I also resist using epic to mean something that is impressive. Epic the adjective comes to us from epic the noun, referring to long narrative poems about heroes (think the Iliad) or to works or legends that are epic-like. As an adjective, it can also refer to deeds or stories that are like those of the classical epics, and it can mean something “extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope,” as Merriam-Webster puts it. M-W adds that it has a “broadly, informal” sense meaning “extraordinary” or “impressive”: an epic party, sandwich, vacation, or nap. I can’t bring myself to use epic that way.
Some of the usages I avoid are ones that strike me as fraught with ambiguity rather than trendiness. The adverb barely has shifted for many speakers from meaning “scarcely” or “hardly” to meaning “recently.” But the possibility for misunderstanding became evident when a colleague referred to “a publication that barely came out.” I was barely able to suppress a smile. Barely too will make its way into the dictionary with the new meaning “recently.” It is a subtle enough change, like the generational shift from “by accident” to “on accident,” and will take hold without much fanfare.
I’m happy to be an appreciative bystander to these epic changes, even if I don’t adopt them. Yet.
Featured image by Ross Findon via Unsplash.
I can’t come at ‘on accident’ – it seems to make no sense. I visualise something sitting atop an ‘accident’. Very strange…
This is what happens when there is not an Academy to hold the fort.
Spanish and German have them, so the new “creations” have currency only among the same-cloth individuals.
I don’t know if you have come cross Calpol =https://www.calpol.co.uk/our-products/calpol-infant-suspension The word is obviously a noun BUT overhearing mothers talking about problems in getting their little darlings to sleep it has been used as a verb. Example = “I want to go out tonight so I’m going to calpol him” . Not usual English parenting!