EKE. CIRCUMVENT.
You know words like that could get a speaker or writer in trouble in modern-day Barbados?
People who would almost, it seems, move heaven and earth to find out the latest about Britney Spears and Kim Kardashian; people who would spare no expense for Remy hair and brand-name wear and even spend a thousand dollars on a Kadooment costume – but not $50 on a dictionary . . . not a few of those same people would blast you for using a word that is unfamiliar to them.
With all the talk about how educated our people are, don’t you find that you are meeting a disturbing number of people who are offended if you use a word they (in many cases, surprisingly) don’t know. And that they don’t seem to want to learn anything – well, except the latest gossip?
They firing back at you, “Why you got to use a word that I don’t know?” Or telling somebody, “He only use dah word because he want to show off.”
With strident show of offence, many a modern-day Barbadian will apparently not stand for anyone using words that they (the offended) had not encountered in a basal reader in primary school.
And yuh want to tell me that Barbados has not become the “dunciest boy” in the regional class, as Clyde Mascoll has claimed?
This is such a change. Our people once relished encountering new words, new turns of phrase. They saw it as a natural part of their education.
Time was when a word even to the “unwise” was sufficient. Yuh could use a word like “ignoble” and it was sufficient to make them scour the context, pause and reflect or run for a dictionary or discreetly seek the meaning from someone else – so that they could develop themselves.
So when at 15 I encountered “ineluctable” and “paroxysm”, you t’ink I cared if the writer or speaker (I can’t remember which now) was showing off or being pompous or inappropriate? Let those whose business it is to deal with such get on with that. I had business to do with the surrounding words (the context), with the dictionary, and with the possibility of using those words myself. And learning. That was my side of the road.
I remember my father at the age of 70 and beyond, a man who had never seen the inside of a secondary school classroom, keen about discussing words that he had recently encountered for the first time. He kept a dictionary close by and from time to time would try to catch me out on the meaning of a word. One day he pelt “discommode” pun my wife.
(This is another change: you notice how years ago, those from the lower echelons strove to disentangle themselves from those practices that marked them off as unrefined or unsophisticated – and not to be “poor great” either! – reaching for more articulate speech, more (at least public) decency, better self-presentation?
But today many who want to broadcast that they are middle class – leh two pay days disappear and you will discover that they are, in fact, simply middle income (still thank God for that) – trying to see how much they can embrace lower standards.)
Yes, we dislike pompous and pretentious language. And obviously speakers and writers sometimes use inappropriately chosen unfamiliar words. But when reading, unless we are in judging mode (what about learning mode?), why are we going to fixate on that?
Even so, we should know that every use of an unfamiliar word by a writer/speaker is not a case of “messing with your head” or of self-indulgence. They may be aiming for a fine distinction. “Nothing is so important to clear and accurate expression as the ability to distinguish between words of similar, but not identical meaning,” writes noted semanticist S. I. Hayakawa.
“There are no exact synonyms,” we have heard, highlighting the need for nuance in the use of words or phrases that have similar meanings. Proof enough has often been provided by the more enterprising students of English who sometimes produce the equivalent of the well known joke sentence “he extinguished the cat by its narrative”.
If you ever get your hands on Cassell’s Modern Guide To Synonyms And Related Words (later reprinted as The Penguin Guide To Synonyms And Related Words) or Merriam-Webster Dictionary Of Synonyms, you will be amazed at the shades of difference between words whose use you thought you fully understood. These books provide full discussions of sets of synonymous words, describing the subtle distinctions that would make one word more appropriate than another in a particular context.
Words within a seeming synonymous set may be geographical variants, different degrees of abstraction, different levels of concreteness, different degrees of formality, suggestive of different relationships among parties (for example: accompany, conduct, chaperone, escort, convoy) and so on.
This is about more than words, though.
I think this increasing negative response to unfamiliar words is a symptom of our failure to continually engage learning so as to grapple with new circumstances. The so-called “big word” reaction is now, I think, a sign of our disinclination to deal with the real “big world” in ways other than our own out-of-step means. It looks as though many among us feel that we can throw certification, old learning, street info, umbrage-taking and money at the challenges an ever-changing world is throwing up.
I have worried for some time that we are not evidencing the passion for lifelong learning that should be a corollary of the provision of education such as we Barbadians have been fortunate to be the beneficiaries of and a vital requirement for an evolving world.
Most people in this much schooled land read only the newspaper, smartphone texts, Facebook and other forms of Internet lite, and whatever they are forced to read if they are engaged in formal study. They can’t honestly say that they are constantly reading much non-fiction – that, for instance, since the beginning of the year they have read a few books and a fair number of learned articles (not in the newspaper) on what they do for a living or in some other area of development.
So now yuh gine “spite” me for saying that?
Lay off the offence and potshots – and reflect some more.
This “new” response to unfamiliar words may well be just the tip of a much more dangerous problem.
Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.
