A selection of words that you can safely toss out ofyourvocabulary － The Economist J an. 5 2019 Johnson Column 死語の選別
For many people, new year’s resolutions entails a clean-out of cupboard or basement. All thoseonce-useful but now clapped-out gadgets, outmoded ortoo-small clothes, thecables to devices long since lost, the book that, once read, will never beopened again －off they go to be recycled. Like households, language is tidied and renovated,but constantly rather once a year. Just as you no longer use the chargers fordiscarded phones, you can safely forget a generation of earlier techvocabulary. Nobody “instant-messages”anyone anymore; stand-alone chat services have given way to versionsintegrated into smartphones or platforms such as Face book and Slack. Speakingof Facebook, you may not realize that the “Poke” and “Wave” features still exist, though hardly anyoneuse them, or the attendant terms. But technical obsolescence need not dictatethe linguistic kind. Computers remind users of their early days every time they“boot” them. Once, computers could not store theirown operating systems. Since it is hard to load software (including anoperating system) without already running software, the clever fixes to thisproblem were seen as akin to “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”. “Boot” survived even as computers outgrew thisflaw, much as the image of a floppy disk remains the visual embodiment of the “save” function. A common target for a clean-up is the categoryof “awesome” words: brilliant, amazing, epic and theirlike were all once best in class. They have, through endless use, becomedilapidated. They commonly feature on peevers’most-hated-words lists, but there is no realreason to bemoan their rise and fall. Like physical items, terms in frequentuse (and people do often need to describe awesome and brilliant things) simplywear with repetition. They must be replaced; just as motorists need new tyresevery so often, so it is with these words. Then there is fashion. In everycupboard are a few items which, though hardly tattered, are hopelesslyunwearable, screaming “2013!” In the lexical wardrobe, think of “metrosexual”, useful for about five minutes in 2003 orthereabouts,
to describe straight men who waxed, took expensive care of their hair and so on.“Metrosexual” faded not mainly because it went out ofdate, but rather the opposite, because of the success of the underlyingconcept; even though men started wearing beards and lumberjack shirts, they didso with exquisite care. In other words, every man is metrosexual now, expectedto spend time on his grooming. So there is little need for the moniker.
In the same vein, “hipster” culture is so dominant, from bare-brick coffee-shops to cocktail bars,that there is scarcely any reason to notice it. Google searches for the labelpeaked in America in 2011 and worldwide in 2015. Picking on hipster is passe:the photo-blog “Look At This Fucking Hipster” last posted in 2010. When does a wordbecome unfashionable? When unfashionable people start using it, of course. Inother words, well before these Google peaks － driven as they are by theuninitiated, many of them looking to learn the meaning of a trendy piece ofjargon for the first time. As such searches rise, the cool kids who came upwith the slang in the first place will have already moved on, preserving theiravant-garde status by coining something else. By this rationale, several bitsof recent political slang are clearly on their way ou t too. “Woke”, briefly popular to playfully describesomeone politically enlightened and on the left, peaked in Google searches inMay 2017; it seems primarily to be used sarcastically, either by woke typesthemselves deriding the faux-woke, or by conservatives belittling the wholewoke enterprise. It is headed the same way as “social-justice warrior”, a phrase meaning roughly the same thing as“woke”, which travelled the same road from lionizingself-description to gibe. It is now such a cliche, even as an insult, that it, too,is ready for junk heap (or perhaps, in keeping with its meaning the charityshop). Linguistic conservatives seem to wish language would just sit still.Even some people who are liberal-minded in politics can become more fusty overlanguage as they get older. But hoping words would stop rising and, more to thepoint, falling, is as futile as wanting technology, politics or fashion tofreeze. Be
as conservatives as you like in your own vocabulary －recycling old favourites and disdaining thelatest duds －but time will nonetheless do its work.
