It’s all made up

I know that languages evolve and change over time, and the English we speak today is quite different from that of just a few centuries ago, but there is a growing and disturbing trend of just making stuff up that is really starting to get to me. Some people are trying to feign intelligence by sticking bits of words together. The biggest misuse at the moment seems to revolve around the word or prefix “pre”. According the OED “pre” means “before”, from the Latin “prae”. So for example “predict” (comes from the Latin praedicere) means to make known before hand. Whilst at work the other day I heard mention of a “pre-awareness” campaign for our potential customers. Surely awareness takes one of two forms, you either are aware or you are not, so (bearing in mind the meaning of pre) pre-awareness is simply a campaign to make people not aware?

It happens at home too. Have you pre-heated an oven lately? An oven has two states of being; on or off, hot or cold. To be “pre-heated” it is to be cold, as pre heating an oven is in its cold state. Going on holiday soon? Will the airline commence “pre-boarding shortly”? We’re all pre-boarding! We’re not yet on board! And don’t even start me on the idea of getting “on” a plane, wouldn’t you rather get “in”? The airlines then come up with another little cracker at the end of your flight, “If Gatwick is your final destination today…”. Oh where to begin? First off, surely your destination is “final” by definition or it wouldn’t be your destination and secondly who the hell has a destination of Gatwick? I thought I’d go home (or on with holiday etc) rather than stay at the airport.

Airline staff are amongst a growing list of professions that are inventing English to suit their roles. Does anyone other than the Police use the word “proceeding”? Personnel became Human Resources or even just resourcing in some cases. Advertisers are often telling us about “New and improved” products, but which is it? New would indicate it never existed before whilst improved means an existing product has been refined to be better, so how can anything be new and improved?

Then there’s the cosmetics industry. Does “Boswelox” exist or was it a drunken slurred version of “bollocks”? There’s pro-retinol this, pre-tensium that, active hydratherapides the other! It’s all crap! My favourite product though was an anti bloating remedy called Deflatine (pronounced deaf - la - teen), isn’t that just “deflating”?

Did English speakers of the past go through this same angst at what they saw was the changing face of their language? All words have to be made up at some point, but cobbling two together for marketing or smugness purposes just seems wrong.

This entry was posted on 22/06/2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Random stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.