Tech Is Shrinking Our Vocabulary
It seems we are losing our zeal for making up new words.
Riddle me this: what do the words ‘addiction’, ‘eventful’, ‘savage’, and ‘indistinguishable’* have in common? Answer: they were all created by one person. In the course of one play. And if you still haven’t worked it out (do try to keep up), that person is Shakespeare, and the play is Hamlet. Scholars disagree on the number of words Shakespeare coined while writing what Harold Bloom called ‘theatre of the world’ and compared to the Commedia, Faust and Paradise Lost (whose author coined even more words than Shakespeare). But it is generally thought that across the whole of Shakespeare’s corpus he created well over a thousand words, with some putting the number at 1,700.
Shakespeare, like Leonardo or Dante or Raphael or Bach, was one of those supremely creative people who turns up perhaps once every couple of centuries. But he also happened to be working with a peculiarly promiscuous language: English, then and now, is all too willing to invite back home just about any word or phrase that flashes a smile in its direction. It was for this reason that Joseph Conrad, one of our language’s more elegant exponents, chose English over both his native Polish and over French, the language he knew second best. For Conrad, to write in French one had to be ‘an engineer’. If you did not know a word in English, he said, you could just make one up.
English, then and now, is all too willing to invite back home just about any word or phrase that flashes a smile in its direction.
Not all made-up words catch on and find a more or less permanent place in the lexicon, even if they stick in the memory. My absolute favourite in this genre comes from Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which the author describes the surf ‘flinking’ off a reef:
‘Out there, perhaps a mile away, the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and beyond that the open sea was dark blue.’
That word captures in a single syllable the somewhat whimsical nature of sunlight, bright and shimmering, and the emotional sound of it rebounding off the rolling waves breaking on the coral reef, just off an isolated island. Odd that from a book about the regression of young boys to a primitive and uncultured state, that one word is what I remember best … But I digress.
It is only superficially ironic that in an age of massive connectivity (if not massive or even much connection) our linguistic creativity seems to be waning. Research suggests that the rate at which we create new words, whatever you might say about ‘noob’ or ‘unalive’ or ‘selfie’, is slowing. And this is happening as cultural products, from films to video games, media outlets, and human beings grow exponentially in number worldwide. It seems that as we advance more technologically, we lose our zeal — or capacity — to be creative linguistically.
It is only superficially ironic that in an age of massive connectivity (if not massive or even much connection) our linguistic creativity has waned.
Some writers argued long before the internet appeared that we should work with a limited vocabulary. Orwell — like Conrad, a great stylist in his way — wrote in his widely cited list of rules for writing that we should ‘never use a foreign word if [we] can think of an everyday English equivalent’ — asserting, at least for the purposes of political communication, a kind of lowest-common denominator or ‘democratic’ approach to speech and writing that did away with any word or phrase that might obscure its meaning. Good prose, he wrote in his 1949 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, should be ‘like a window-pane’. And his approach had the added benefit of being accessible: as a champion of the working class, Orwell presumably hoped to make his work comprehensible to all. His advice, condemned by Will Self as reactionary, remains useful in my view. Orwell also gave permission for his readers to break his rules judiciously. His talent, in any case, was being sufficiently eloquent to combine the short or simple words he liked in such a way as to please what Martin Amis called the ‘inner ear’.
You might justifiably point to such crimes against that inner ear, as well as the eye, as ‘amazeballs’, to claim that we are, in fact, making words up. And you would be right to say it. We are. But not with anything like the zeal, speed or originality that we used to. Studies have shown a decline in the introduction and usage of new words over the 20th century. And the words we make up now seem more fancy than imagination, if we can use Coleridge’s distinction: fancy meaning existing things assembled like IKEA furniture; imagination involving the truly new. ‘Cloud computing’, ‘artificial intelligence’, big data’ — these are not fresh inventions. Each is a Frankenstein’s monster of a word, put together with parts to describe something novel. In respect of our vocabulary, then, we are, at best, recycling most of the time, not creating.
Why is this? There are a number of reasons we could suggest. First, we are distracted: ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’, as Eliot put it. Though there is some debate around whether our attention spans have actually narrowed, there is broad consensus (because we have all experienced it) that we are being pulled this way and that all day and every day by new stimuli. Who has the time, the patience, the inclination to stick with that blinking cursor and wait for a genuinely new word to bubble up to the surface of her mind? We could be swiping, surfing, searching, browsing, refreshing our favourite dating app in quest of a bit of cheap validation. Auto-correct, meanwhile, forces uniformity upon us, stifling the creation of words while accelerating the creation of grammar Nazis.
There is a reason why tabloids run headlines like ‘Kendra hubby’s rage at sex pest’.
It doesn’t help that algorithms feed us the same thin gruel day after day. We encounter the same people and the same concepts; and, with them, the same words, phrases, analogies and metaphors. Nor is it conducive to creation to be confronted with character restrictions, even if it takes some skill to say a lot with a little. (There is a reason why tabloids run headlines like ‘Kendra hubby’s rage at sex pest’ — headlines containing words one Guardian writer dubbed ‘thinnernyms’.) But once we have mastered that art, we are still hamstrung by the space available, liable to use words that others do so as not to reach the greatest number of people.
And this points to something else: the primacy of meaning over music in our choice of words today. The very best writers do not just tell us; they show us. ‘Do not tell me the moon is shining,’ said Chekhov. ‘Show me a glint of light on a piece of glass.’ What makes words, terms and phrases stay with us is not just what they signify but how they sound—alone or when combined with other words. Their rhythm, their euphony, their sweetness—these make words and their meanings stick. As to those who would say the musicality of a word or phrase is purely subjective, consider that running water sounds better than nails on a chalkboard: a hierarchy of sounds clearly exists. And why would that not apply to the words we use? Listen to the music of Evelyn Waugh:
‘Do not tell me the moon is shining,’ said Chekhov. ‘Show me a glint of light on a piece of glass.’
‘I have been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as is given us once or twice in a life-time, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.’
Does any of this matter? I would suggest that it does. It matters because any given word exists only because there is a felt need for it to exist. No two words, however superficially similar, mean quite the same thing, and scrupulous writers are always in search of the mot juste to convey exactly what they mean. It follows that when we are creating words, our joint perception of the world is getting bigger. We are discovering more as we make our way through life, and searching for ways to describe precisely what we are experiencing so we can share our perspective with others. If this is the case, and I think it is, then our experience of the world, or its richness, is getting smaller.
*A previous version of this article erroneously included ‘majestic’ among the words the Bard made up. Thank you to Rui Alves for pointing this out.
