When Change is Good

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in the New York Times (Feb­ru­ary 29, 2008), “more than one in 100 Amer­i­can adults are behind bars.” It some­times seems like our leg­is­la­tors are hell­bent on turn­ing us into a nation of jailbirds.

Rocket sci­en­tists, alas, are a much rarer species. This can have embar­rass­ing con­se­quences for those of us who make our liv­ing as writ­ers, as I dis­cov­ered to my cha­grin back in Jan­u­ary 2002.

Back then I was lead writer for the hard­ware prod­uct mar­ket­ing web­sites at Apple. I’d writ­ten a page for the Power­Book G4 that extolled, among other things, its quan­tum increase in pro­cess­ing power.

This was igno­rance on my part. My lapse appar­ently amused a fel­low named Lars at Math­e­mat­ica, and he sent some­one he knew at Apple an email.

Here’s what the snip­pet that was passed on to me said: “Could some­one please teach the guys at Apple ele­men­tary physics? A quan­tum is the small­est pos­si­ble energy incre­ment. So they just pulled the most min­i­mal increase in pro­cess­ing power possible.”

Oops. Lars was right, of course. My bad.

Now in case you don’t know it, besides mak­ing you feel like a dolt, emails that point out mis­takes in prod­uct mar­ket­ing copy can cre­ate panic at some companies.

Depend­ing on who you work for, the typ­i­cal knee-jerk over­re­ac­tion could range from emer­gency meet­ings to rep­ri­mands from edi­tors, or — in extreme cases — a hys­ter­i­cal out­burst from the Chicken Lit­tle head of cor­po­rate PR, whose team has been fully mobi­lized and placed on red alert.

But Apple is a dif­fer­ent kind of com­pany. Our prod­uct mar­ket­ing man­agers, bless them, were aware that web copy isn’t set in stone and can be changed in an instant. The phrase “quan­tum increase” was changed to “quan­tum leap,” and the Power­Book went on sell­ing like the prover­bial hotcakes.

My point is that until Lars showed me the error of my ways, idiots like myself (and I’m not alone), thought a quan­tum increase meant a huge increase. That’s because most of us don’t learn the mean­ings of words and phrases from a dictionary.

We get a sense of mean­ing from con­text. This works pretty good for the most part, but there are times when the sound or tone of some words or phrases may sug­gest a com­pletely dif­fer­ent or even oppo­site meaning.

For exam­ple, when peo­ple say things like, “Deb­bie is gung ho to get started,” they’re using gung ho to mean the per­son has a can-do atti­tude or is highly moti­vated to do something.

Fact is, gung ho was orig­i­nally Chi­nese for work together. It was intro­duced into the Amer­i­can lex­i­con in 1942 by Evans Fordyce Carl­son, an old China hand who made gung ho (as in work together) the motto of the 2nd Marine Raider battalion.

But the sound of gung ho (and maybe also its ini­tial asso­ci­a­tion with Carlson’s Raiders) sug­gested an entirely dif­fer­ent mean­ing. And that is the mean­ing it has today in pop­u­lar usage.

In The Prob­lem of Style, a col­lec­tion of lec­tures deliv­ered at Brasenose Col­lege, Oxford, in 1922, John Mid­dle­ton Murry noted how pop­u­lar usage sets in motion the process he called smooth­ing the coinage of language.

Pop­u­lar usage can change what a word means, so that over time some words and phrases can even take on the mean­ing of their antonyms.

Watch the news anchors on tele­vi­sion and sooner or later you’ll hear one of them talk­ing earnestly about towns that have been “dec­i­mated,” obvi­ously intend­ing to con­vey the news that the pop­u­la­tion in said towns had been wiped out almost to the last man.

As it hap­pens, the word dec­i­mate is derived from the Latin dec­i­mare, mean­ing to take a tenth part from. The strict def­i­n­i­tion used to be, to kill one in every ten of. But dec­i­mate sounds like it means a total mas­sacre, and that’s the way it is most fre­quently used.

Many dic­tio­nar­ies have bowed to pop­u­lar usage and list two def­i­n­i­tions of the word dec­i­mate: to destroy and kill a large pro­por­tion of, as well as its orig­i­nal mean­ing (to kill one in every ten of).

Speak­ing for myself, I’m not inclined to be stam­peded by the objec­tions of a pedan­tic per­son. The his­tory of lan­guage shows that in any dis­pute over proper usage, the ver­nac­u­lar wins every time. But when you’re dead wrong, as I was with my Power­Book copy, the best thing to do is cor­rect your mis­take and enjoy the rest of your life. Because when you indulge your­self as a writer and allow your copy to stray too far ahead of pop­u­lar usage, the ad itself could become an issue and a distraction.

Few peo­ple read­ing this are likely to recall the line Win­ston tastes good like a cig­a­rette should. There was an out­cry from acad­eme when it first appeared. Stick­lers for gram­mar pro­fessed out­rage at Young & Rubi­cam for its lapse in using “like” instead of “as.” But Y&R’s copy chief George Grib­bin stood his ground; that was the way most peo­ple spoke, he said, and he was right.

The moral of the story? Change is good — some­times, anyway.

Copy­right © 2008 The Gra­ham Agency. All rights reserved.

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