Posted by Jay Livingston
Some fashions trickle down through the social class lattice. It’s as though people look to those just above them to see what they’re wearing or what names they’re giving their kids. I see the same process with some words, though the crucial dimension is not wealth but apparent intelligence or education. You hear someone use the word fortuitous. It sounds so much more sophisticated than fortunate, and it seems to mean the same thing. So you swap out the more pedestrian term, and the next time you catch a lucky break, you say that it was fortuitous.
When something is perfect, why say that it’s merely ideal when you could say that it’s idyllic? It sounds similar, and you hear people use it in a context where ideal would also work, so it probably means the same thing. It just sounds so much more like a word the very well educated would use. That’s why when I serve the salad, I ask my guests for their choice of dressage, which has the added advantage of sounding French.
And now we have Gwyneth Paltrow trying to jack up the tone of her advice just a notch. Here is a report from The Guardian.
(Click for a slightly larger view.)
It wasn’t the Mugwort the got me. It was the Latin. What happened to etc.? Et (and) cetera (the rest of these things). Et al. is for when the too-numerous-to-mention are people rather than things. They are alia – others. In the footnotes, et alia (“and other people”) gets abbreviated to et al.
Needless to say, et al. is the province of the very educated – the kind of people who talk about articles that have multiple authors. Etc., by contrast, seems so ordinary. Everyone uses it. So to give your Mugowrt advice a more scholarly aura, use et al. Like idyllic, it’s gotta mean the same thing as the ordinary version. Except it doesn’t. Steaming your vagina to “cleanse your uterus, et al.
Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood?
2 comments:
Reminds me of this story from Daniel Handler:
"[C]ertainly when the 12th volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events came out, which was called The Penultimate Peril, I found that there were people who knew what that word ['penultimate'] meant and people who didn't, but that that line was not along age lines at all. I remember there was an article in a newspaper that said, 'It's the penultimate book from the penultimate author.' They were just sort of using the word as some kind of placeholder, whereas children learned quickly what it meant and were more quick to adopt it. You see failed vocabulary in the adult world so often, and it's often because once you reach a certain age you're kind of embarrassed to go look up a word if you don't know what it means. And then you just start using it however it feels right. ... I think children are less embarrassed to go look up the truth."
I like his term -- "failed vocabulary." Another example I hear too often is erstwhile to mean formidable or something like that. After all, if you hear someone speak "my erstwhile colleague, Mr. So-and-so," it sounds like it could mean formidable. And in time, it probably will.
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