Scholars are generally agreed that, in the natural evolutionary process of language, words change their meaning. In a Darwinlike process they adapt to their environments and climates and thus survive. A popular example of this process of adaptation is the word ”clinic”, which derives from the Greek klinikos — kline, a bed. The archaic use of the word was ”one confined to bed by sickness” (according to Chambers). Today the word means a bit more than just a bed and, as a noun, is used for a medical institution of some sort or another. Healing also comes into it as in ”golf clinics”, where arthritic swings and diffuse short-iron play are diagnosed and cured. Its other use is adjectival: ”clinical”, which means (again Chambers) ”hospital-like; concerned with, based on, observation, strictly objective, plain, functional in appearance — as in ”a clinical analysis of Mr Mbeki’s ANC Today response to Bishop Tutu reveals the president might be suffering from a political syndrome known as idiosyncratic gram-negative moral dystrophy”.
Words adapt to their usage, as indeed do their pronunciations. As an example, anyone listening to our television newscasts will have noticed the decomposition of the correct pronunciations of ”protest”, a word which changes its form according to how it is said. Correctly, with the stress on its first syllable, ”protest” is a noun. When it’s a verb, it is correctly pronounced with the stress on its second syllable.
Try and sell that sort of post-modern colonialist-carried-forward-white-superiority-lingual advice to the average SABC television newsreader and Jimi Matthews will personally throw you down the stairs. Today’s television newsreaders are taught to ignore verbal niceties such as pronouncing words like ”protest” correctly. It’s in their contracts: ”The use of queer and/or complicating English pronunciations is as vital contradiction against the SABC TV News Code as approve over there by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa. And squatters doesn’t know the difference anyway.”
Saddest of all is when perfectly good words get so overused they lose their meaning. They become like ancient tyres, of such prodigious mileage they are worn flat, completely without any tread pattern. They slide all over the road no matter how viciously you screw the steering wheel. Of many instances, among the most obvious is that once-proud word ”democracy”, and its attendant adjective, ”democratic”. Those two have skidded off literally billions of glib political tongues, and are thus so bruised as to have become almost meaningless.
When it comes to what shreds of definition it has left, ”democracy” and its derivatives can be used by virtually anyone to mean anything at all. It’s now just a strip of dry verbal connective fibre, sewn into a sentence with crude stitches so as to make it sound grand and of mystical decree. Democracy is a one-word slogan. It was used with great enthusiasm by the Nationalist government; it often stumbled across Pik Botha’s lips as he strode the world selling the apartheid reverie. Stalin squeezed every last drop of blood out of his ”democracy”. So did Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet, Nicolae Ceausescu. The word can describe any political circumstance you like because ”democracy” is now a verbal hooker, modifying its rented desire to the particular horizontal john, emitting the same faked orgasmic yelpings it does for all the other ones. (Yes, I know my metaphors are mixed.)
”Racism” is another word that’s fast running out of oomph. It has been so overexposed, so grossly misused as to be almost dead in its slot. You can hear the better commentators trying desperately not to use it, lest they sound like the pea-brained politicians they’re describing. Instead of racism, they fall back on the long-winded: ”disgraceful policies of the segregationist” or ”odious discriminatory covenants of those who believe themselves genetically preeminent”. Anything is better than the sickening thud as another crippled word falls to the ground.
Among my treasured sorrows is the way the word ”create” has been hijacked, along with ”genius” and a few others like them and which have very special pedigrees. ”Create” means to bring into being or from out of nothing (Chambers again). My WASP upbringing long since settled the word in my mind as used in Genesis, whereby the heaven and the Earth were created in six days out of naught but His imagination by some tall old guy with a long white beard. How He would fit into the ”creative” meditative crucible of a contemporary advertising agency is anybody’s guess. ”Creative” is a linchpin word in advertising jargon. ”In the beginning God created the new Cobra SupaShyne Floor Polish campaign. On the seventh day He went to Sun City for a line or two of Christopher Colombian before picking up his Golden Loerie for genius.”
Genius — poor old, dear old, shabby old genius. Now applied either to footballers or any pop singer using more than three chords in his harmonies. We dreary old-timers find it kinda grates on the ear-bones to hear a word nominally reserved for the Schuberts and Shakespeares applied to the likes of David Beckham or Johnny Clegg.
How the hell did I get to Clegg so soon after Schubert?