Beware of Mutants

by Howard Posner

For months, an Associated Press report about Dick Cheney has made me think about making love.

(I need to pause a moment. That first sentence is the best attention-getting opener I'm ever going to write. You can take me now, Lord. As soon as I finish this column.)

The December 2, 2008, AP story begins, "A judge dismissed indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales on Monday and chastised the southern Texas prosecutor who brought the case."

Chastise brought me up short, because I understood it to mean "punish," and indeed my 1968 Random House Unabridged defines it as "to discipline, esp. by corporal punishment" (along with two "archaic" definitions: to "restrain, chasten" and "to refine; purify"; an even older usage is "to make chaste"). AP wasn't saying the judge had the prosecutor flogged; newer dictionaries say chastise also means "criticize severely." Some time in the last 40 years, the word changed meaning - or at least added one - and nobody had the decency to tell me.

Make love used to refer to wooing or courting, and mutated into a synonym for intercourse in the 1960s, at least among younger folk. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was about 56 in 1975 when she wrote about Cary Grant (whose films had lots of romance but no physical sex), "Making love to him, the heroines of the later movies are all aware that he's a legendary presence." A younger writer would have used a different expression.

I'm not sure why make love changed meanings. English accumulates lots of euphemisms for sex, probably because the non-euphemistic terms are crude, clinical, or hard to spell. But chastise changed for the most common reason: It got used incorrectly so often that the incorrect meaning became accepted as the correct one.

This is not a modern phenomenon caused by lax standards and social permissiveness. The process has been going on since there were words to misuse, and it has affected a lot of words. A page picked at random from Henry Cockeram's (H.C. Gent.) 1647 English Dictionarie, or An Interpreter of Hard English Words, yields such mutators as connive ("to wink at a thing"), conglomerate ("to wind up on bottoms"), conjure ("to swear, or conspire together, to bind by oath"), consequence ("that which followeth after"), and considerate ("wise, discreet").

These words didn't change because of some 50-year plan. It was evolution through error: An expression used as its own second cousin long enough became its own second cousin, or a complete stranger, despite self-appointed language guardians who condemned erroneous usage, just as their self-appointed descendants now turn up their noses at it.

I suppose I'm a self-appointed whatever, and I do my share of nose-turn-upping, but in this column I give practical advice. So here it is: Be aware that the meanings of some words are at war, but your proper role is conscientious objector. Avoid being misunderstood by avoiding words that are mutating.

You can let others cry in the wilderness that problematic means "uncertain" or "theoretical" and is not an adjectival form of problem; that hopefully means "in a hopeful manner," not "it is hoped"; that a propos means "on the subject of," not "appropriate"; that sympathy and empathy are different ways that I feel your pain; that livid means "pale"; and that not every coincidence is "ironic" (does anyone really know what ironic means?). You just stay safely out of the wilderness.

If you ask clients or colleagues to "peruse" a document, will they think you're asking them to examine it carefully, or to glance at it? If you don't know the answer to that question - and believe me, you don't - avoid the word and use examine when that's what you mean.

We highly trained legal thinkers understand "beg the question" to mean "reason in a circle." But to the laity (even the sophisticated laity) it's a synonym for "pose the question," which begs - sorry, poses - the question whether the traditional "correct" meaning is now one more instance of lawyers using old language that nobody else understands. Avoid it unless you're addressing a lawyer or philosophy professor.

When George Bush was elected president in 1988, he said he couldn't believe the "enormity" of what had happened, drawing sniggers from cognoscenti who knew that enormity meant "great evil." Twenty years later, when Barack Obama told voters that they had just elected him because they "understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead," there were still sniggers, but the word's original sense was obviously a lost cause: There's now a bipartisan consensus for enormity as a synonym for huge. I'd still avoid enormity in any sense.

When Obama, during the 2008 campaign, said he was "really happy by how nonplussed" his daughters were, meaning "unfazed" instead of the dictionary's "bewildered," the new meaning was already fairly common; there's no stopping it now that it has a presidential imprimatur.

Can meaning mutation ever be reversed? Maybe. For its first century or so, chauvinism (named for Chauvin, a comical 19th-century French stage character who was fanatical about Napoleon and Empire) meant exaggerated, bellicose patriotism and blind belief in national superiority. It was never popular in the United States, probably because there are so many chauvinists here, but in the 1970s it was appropriated by college-educated feminists, and "male chauvinism" somehow became such a common synonym for "male sexism" (designations of female sexism is a whole other semantic story) that the "male" part was often dropped. The original meaning may be reasserting itself, and I've seen chauvinism used to mean sexism, jingoism, ethnocentrism, and a few other things. It's probably best to eschew it in favor of a synonym with less baggage, though I find it sometimes useful in a jocular or ironic sense. At least, I think I do: I'm not sure what ironic means.

Howard Posner practices appellate law in Los Angeles, consults with other lawyers about writing, and writes about nonlegal matters.

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