Buzzwords Drone On

Veteran readers may recall our calling attention to the problem of word inflation. Buzzwords are a prime culprit, and when they become so pervasive they’re virtually inaudible, we should start listening, as Judith Shulevitz, science editor of  the New Republic, reminds us. Take disruptive, which permeates cliché-ridden venues like the platforms at TED talks and the pages of Forbes. "Disruptive doesn’t mean what it used to," she notes. "It’s no longer the adjective you hope not to hear in parent-teacher conferences. It’s what you want investors to say about your new social-media app" ― ah, there's the rub. For additional examples of insufferable argot, read her essay.

Building Blocks of English: Affixes

Affixes are building blocks of language. The four types are prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, and infixes. We are familiar with prefixes, which placed at the beginning of words qualify their meaning (inappropriate) and suffixes, which convert the stem into another part of speech (celebrate to celebration). Combining forms, which can be either prefixes or suffixes, add another layer of meaning to words (biochemistry; pesticide). The least common affixes are infixes, which are placed within a word (in this case, to form the plural cupsful).

A Wealth of Words

There’s a positive correlation between a student’s vocabulary and the likelihood he'll graduate from college and his future income, Prof. E.D Hirsch, Jr. notes in a recent commentary. Vocabulary is a relevant  proxy for a range of educational attainments ― not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, but knowledge of science, history, and the arts. “If we want to reduce economic inequality,” he concludes, “a good place to start is the language-arts classroom.” A Wealth of Words

Parsing Punditry

“A bun is the lowest form of wheat,” my father would say to me as a lad, recalling the general opinion of the status of the pun as a purported form of wit. As an inveterate punster in my college days — I'll spare you the painful proof, I defended the art as a literary form, noting the self-evident fact that puns are crafted to solicit groans, not laughs. But how did the pun acquire such a dubious reputation? the BBC News Magazine asks and answers. It's an intriguing analysis, as one might expect from the source, but, caveat emptor,  cites several puns. The Pun Conundrum

Word Inflation Drives Devaluation

“If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten,” Yale University computer scientist David Galertner opens his reply to Edge's 2013 question: What should we be worried about? “The Internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word's value,” he continues. As each word attracts less time and money from readers, it garners less time and effort from writers. As investment by writers and readers declines, society's ability to communicate decays, delivering what Galertner aptly describes as a “body blow to science, scholarship, the arts—to nearly everything, in fact, that is distinctively human.”  Worry About Internet Drivel