On my hesitance to use "reticent" to mean "hesitant"

Used under Creative Commons from here.

Whenever I'm listening to someone speak, especially a public figure or a television character, and I hear "reticent" used in place of "reluctant" or "hesitant," I think my eye begins to twitch a little. That usage is just wrong, right? Well, as a good postmodern, I've trained myself to stop and consider my potential absolutism whenever my brain renders a subconscious judgment.

You're all familiar, I'm sure, with the idea of language as a living entity, one that evolves and changes over time to properly reflect the current historical moment, society, beliefs, and culture. Terms become archaic (it's seldom that I ask my wife "Whence do you come?" or "Wither shall we go?"), they take on new meanings ("text me later, bro"), neologisms are created ("She IM'd me last night"), and even the use of articles changes (in American English, you rarely see constructions like "an historical moment" [unless someone is trying to be pretentious]).  (This doesn't even touch on the evolution of syntax ("Hi, Chris" becomes the email salutation "Hi Chris," we don't say "What price bananas?" to the person stocking the supermarket in California.)

But I'm not sure that language can live in total postmodernism. For language to be a communicative—which, conveniently enough, is rooted in the same Latin "communis" or "common" as "community"—device, it must hold some common, shared meaning. I think language is most effective when all of the participants connect the same referent with the same referrer, i.e. a rose is a rose; a rose is not an apple.

It turns out that, just like the correct answer to what kind of bear is best, there are two schools of thought, and its unlikely that consensus will take shape.

These two schools are known as descriptivists and prescriptivists. The former, as the name implies, believes that the role of linguists is to watch how language is used and describe it in works such as the OED and Webster's. According to English professor Mark Bauerline, a turning point for descriptivists was the 1961 publishing of Webster's New International Dictionary, the first dictionary to embrace the idea of descriptvism.

Before that time, prescriptivists controlled a linguistic hegemony. This group, as you can likely foresee, believes that there should be an authoritative source (I cringe at the sound of that) on the proper use of language. Bauerline points out that in the Webster's that precedes the 1961 printing, the 1934 edition, some words received the loving categorizations "erroneous" or "illiterate"! (ibid)

I think my other eye just started twitching. It seems that if there is something worse than what seems to be an "incorrect" use of language, it could be a kind of sanctimonious, absolutist body that renders judgment about whether a particular person's use of language is "illiterate"! While the purpose of Bauerline's essay in The Public Discourse, a very conservative publication, is quite to the contrary of the way I'm using it here, it contains good evidence that is useful to this discussion, not the least of which is a quote from Harvard linguist Steven Pinker, who comments on how authoritative uses of language form:

"It begins when a self-anointed expert elevates one of his peeves or cockamamie theories into an authoritative pronouncement that some usage is incorrect, or better still, ignorant, barbaric, and vulgar."

For example, it seems that even John Dryden (of whom I'm a big fan) may be personally responsible for creating the "rule" that one can't end a sentence on a preposition (link found here). I'm not sure what he's going on about.

So that's a fine dilemma. Given all of that, is the person who's reticent to cross this busy street correct (danger of imminent crushage notwithstanding)? I think I'm even more torn than when I first started thinking about this. I really want that usage to be "wrong," but I really don't want there to be a wrong. Given the lesser of two evils situation here, I guess I will cast my vote against conservatism and absolutism. Use words to refer to whatever you want, and I will attempt to divine the referent by the context of the word's use.

When a click will do: A proposal for "liking" email

Photo by: Owen Brown, Used under Creative Commons license
http://www.flickr.com/photos/owenwbrown/4857593259/

As someone who loves writing, language, and the nuance that a command of the language can convey, I feel slightly self-conscious about making the proposal that I’m about to. OK, I’m just going to say it: they should add a “like” button to email services like Gmail. That doesn’t mean, as many have suggested, that it would function as “like” buttons on blogs, which send the item of your liking to Facebook. It means that there should be a quick way to acknowledge the receipt of a message or convey approval when a detailed text-based answer is unnecessary.


Here’s an anecdotal syllogism that could be idiosyncratic to me, but I suspect not:

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Premise 1 — I get a ton of email everyday

Premise 2 — I feel that it’s good form to reply to almost every email to acknowledge it, even if the response is just “thanks!” or “ok”

Therefore — I respond to a ton of freaking email, many of these responses being a single word of acknowledgement/approval.

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So what if, next to the buttons for reply, forward, etc, there were a simple “like” button. It would be a binary communication device that, when clicked, would instantly display to the sender that their message was understood.

Examples: “Great, I’ll be at your house tomorrow at 7pm.” Like. “I ran your budget report and put it in the shared drive for you.” Like. “Everything is going well with the project.” Like.

 Of course, as on Facebook, you could opt to accompany this with a brief message/comment if you so chose, but you would have the option to nicely wrap up a conversation with a  single click.

I think that I, like many, have become accustomed to processing large amounts of information in a scroll, click, and comment style of information filtering and interaction. In Facebook, I move quickly through my newsfeed, reading, liking, briefly commenting, and learning about what my friends are up to. In Twitter, I can read through the tweets of people I following and retweet with the click of a button. In Google Reader, I can move through hundreds of blog posts quickly, sharing with a single click. Why not email too?