IF one cares about the preservation of the English language, a point one often has to decide is whether it is worth putting up a struggle when a word changes its meaning.
Some words are beyond redemption. One could not, I imagine, restore ‘impertinent’ to its original meaning, or ‘journal’, or ‘decimate’. But how about the use of ‘infer’ for ‘imply’ (‘He didn’t actually say I was a liar, but he inferred it’), which has been gaining ground for some years? Ought one to protest against it? And ought one to acquiesce when certain words have their meanings arbitrarily narrowed? Examples are ‘immoral’ (nearly always taken as meaning sexually immoral), and ‘criticize’ (always taken as meaning criticize unfavourably). It is astonishing what numbers of words have come to have a purely sexual significance, partly owing to the need of the newspapers for euphemisms. Constant use of such phrases as ‘intimacy took place twice’ has practically nulled the original meaning of ‘intimacy’, and quite a dozen other words have been perverted in the same way.
Obviously this kind of thing ought to be prevented if possible, but it is uncertain whether one can achieve anything by struggling against the current usage. The coming and going of words is a mysterious process whose rules we do not understand. In 1940 the word ‘wallop’, meaning mild beer, suddenly became current all over London. I had never heard it until that date, but it seems that it was not a new word, but had been peculiar to one quarter of London. Then it suddenly spread all over the place, and now it appears to have died out again. Words can also revive, for no very clear reason, after lying dormant for hundreds of years: for example the word ‘car’, which had never had any currency in England except in highflown classical poetry, but was resurrected about 1900 to describe the newly invented automobile.
Possibly, therefore, the degradation which is certainly happening to our language is a process which one cannot arrest by conscious action. But I would like to see the attempt made. And as a start I would like to see a few dozen journalists declare war on some obviously bad usage—for example, the disgusting verb ‘to contact’, or the American habit of tying an unnecessary preposition on to every verb—and see whether they could kill it by their concerted efforts.
This is an extract from a longer column first published in Tribune, 26th January 1945.
Doesn't "tying an unnecessary preposition on to every verb" use an unnecessary preposition?
As someone passionate about the changing nature of languages (they're living organisms after all) this great article by Orwell has brought to mind another article published at the end of 2023 about how Oxford Dictionary had named "riz" (short for charisma) word of the year. This was the winning word out of a shortlist of eight, which included meanings I couldn't understand after a lifetime of learning and speaking English. Who knows how long they'll be in circulation once GenZ turns 30...