C.S. Lewis: The Death of Words

Today I was talking about pumpkin spice lattes. Judge me if you will. 

My mom seemed surprised that I liked them, but I told her I enjoyed maybe one or two each fall just to set the tone of the season. I then found myself explaining the recent usage of the word basic: someone who’s “only interested in things mainstream, popular, and trending.” Frankly, I felt basic for even knowing that. But my bigger problem is that the word basic already had a perfectly good meaning. Why distort it?

Now, for those of you who are actually cool, you’re thinking, “Um, no one even says ‘basic’ anymore.” I’m sure you’re right. Now that I don’t teach high school, I can’t keep up with what’s hip to jive. But my point is that the meaning of words changes so quickly that I’d need to get an Urban Dictionary app just to keep up. Heaven forbid. That would be so extra.

The Death of Words

I’m sure I won’t be the last to bemoan the degradation of the English language at the hands of hipsters and the like, but I also know I wasn’t the first; C.S. Lewis had plenty to say on the topic. (No, he wasn’t the first either, but he’s the one I’m going to talk about.) Lewis was a linguist. He could read, write, and speak at least eight languages. To him, definitions were important, and accuracy mattered. So you can imagine his chagrin over the decay of definitions. 

In his short essay The Death of Words, Lewis begins by discussing the way that certain denotative words have become merely connotative instead. (Denotative, as I’m sure you know, refers to the purely-literal dictionary definition of a word, whereas connotative refers to the emotional aspect that a word carries. “Mother” is a female progenitor of an offspring. “Mommy” is a nurturing female figure. Stuff like that.) Anyway, Lewis mentions several examples of words that used to mean something very specific but are now used as vague descriptions instead. That really burned his biscuits, and he tells us why.

A Rose by Any Other Name Is Confusing

The decayed word he mentions first is gentleman. Back in the day, a gentleman was a male above the station of yeoman whose family possessed a coat of arms. It wasn’t subjective; either you were or you weren’t a gentleman just like you either are or aren’t a millionaire. It was a fact of social status. But now, Lewis laments, “words which once had a definable sense…are now nothing more than noises of vague approval.” The dictionary tells us that today gentlemanrefers to someone “civilized, sensitive, well-mannered.” In other words, a good person. And therein lies the problem.

“The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition,” says Lewis. “Words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad. As long as most people are more anxious to express their likes and dislikes than to describe facts, this must remain a universal truth about language.” Ouch. 

But you can see the problem, can’t you? If we allow our words of definition to morph into mere descriptions, we won’t have a way to indicate specific things anymore. What would you call an actual millionaire if the word eventually comes to mean “a person with plenty of money”? And, even closer to home, how on earth can you know if someone means it when they use the word “literally”? I literally see that word misused all the time, and it figuratively makes my blood boil. 

The Disappearance of Ideas

All right, I may have gotten a little deeper into the swamp of vocabulary than some of you are interested in. My apologies. While I’m a far cry from the philological purist that Lewis was, I still believe that words have power and should be protected. Why? Because, as Lewis says, “Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”

Have you read George Orwell’s 1984? Why do you think the totalitarian regime watered down the permitted vocabulary until the main adjectives were “good” and “un-good”? If something was wrong or unjust, they couldn’t say so. They had to say “doubleplus un-good.” The same is true in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. In the ant colony (a microcosm of totalitarian rule), the only adjectives were “done” and “not done.” Why? If you can’t name injustice, you will have a much harder time identifying it. 

The same goes for beauty, truth, and a host of other intangible necessities. The words disappear, and the ideas follow. “When…you have killed a word,” says Lewis, “you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for.” And that, my friends, is a serious thoughtcrime. 

An Invective Against Vapid Vocabularies

So when we allow concrete words to disintegrate into mere descriptions, are we in danger of becoming dystopian? Surely not. Well, not yet, at least. But every time a strong word falls out of use only to be replaced by a weak or distorted substitute (or none at all), another mighty thesaurus dies, and the whole species creeps one step closer to extinction. 

So, fellow English speakers, arm yourselves! Let’s do our part to stem the tide of silliness in vocabulary. We can use new words if we must, but let’s use the old words, too. Let’s keep our minds sharp. Otherwise we may find ourselves sipping pumpkin spice lattes with heads as empty as those calories, and the mastermind behind words like “basic” will have us on puppet strings. Again I say Heaven forbid. Rage! Rage against the dying of the mind.

(Was that ending a bit extra? My b.)

Source: 
Lewis, C.S. (1966). On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Harcourt, Inc.