Information fatigue

Modern technology has allowed everything to be captured, structured and stored. Artificial intelligence, including machine translation, in both theory and practice, has made extremely rapid progress. The Turing test, to tell from a screen and keyboard interaction whether you are communicating with a real person or a computer, is likely soon to show that it is no longer possible to make this distinction. A project has recently been identified the aim of which is totally to eradicate all diseases within the next few years, showing the power of computing and the ambition of scientists.

Virtually all information is now available, legally or illegally, and language is no exception. If you are in the habit of checking via your web browser that an expression is correct in this or that form, you are certainly going to find examples which justify anything you wish to say. Someone, somewhere, will have used it rightly or wrongly. Vocabulary and usage are therefore expanding incessantly and the user ends up not knowing what to say or write. This expansion takes place often by the adoption of formerly specialist, technical terms.

This leads to information fatigue: too much information, too much choice, too little discrimination. And this leads to communication which is difficult to understand from people who are confused about what they want to say. Lack of discrimination plus a penchant for following fashion means we often don’t understand what some people are talking about.

In addition to ‘different’ or ‘several different’ we now have information from multiple sources provided by multiple people. The problem, or should I say issue, is not the use of ‘multiple’ which until now has been reserved for more technical circumstances like ‘multiple fractures’ but that ‘different’ is going to find itself not sufficiently sexy, too simple, and will become relegated to history.

The bottom-line (net profit or loss to accountants), used with the meaning of anything from ‘result’ to ‘what I mean’. Definitions include ‘the fundamental and most important factor’, ‘the most basic fact or issue in a situation’. Again this seems to be an Americanism and personally I find it problematic to distinguish whether the user means ‘the result’, ‘the required result’ or ‘what I mean is’. I first came across to second guess about thirty years ago. I didn’t know what it meant then and I still don’t know what it means to this day.

Another example is ‘to prink’ which means to groom, smarten up. You have to have a pretty extensive vocabulary to know this. Currently, there is also to prink, meaning to pre-drink, which itself means to drink alcohol, often at home or in a pub, prior to going on to a club with the aim of becoming seriously inebriated. Compare this with to pre-load which has the same alcoholic meaning as to prink. But ‘to preload’ relates in cardiology to the tension in the heart muscle, as opposed to ‘afterload’. I should hate to think that our cardiologists might end up confusing these terms as other people do with the verb ‘to smoke’: are we talking about tobacco or marijuana?

The BBC reported the following on 23^rd September: “playlists account for 31% of listening time across all demographics, while albums lag behind on 22%”. Do we have to have a term straight out of anthropology when we could easily use ‘audiences’? It’s a good thing to help improve people’s vocabulary, but this one reeks of “Look at me, I’ve just learnt a new word”. So far, we’ve been spared the term ‘cohort’ in this context, from anthropology and statistics again, but I predict that it’s on its way.

On the cusp of, the intended meaning being ‘on the point of’, “the cease-fire was on the cusp of being agreed to”; another technical term, from astrology, incorrectly used when a simple alternative exists. The 2005 annotated edition of the OED does not recognise this usage, but if you look for it on the web, sure enough, it’s there: I am sitting on the cusp of middle age;  X's behaviour is only on the cusp of acceptability; we're on the cusp of something really wonderful. Should you use this expression in your next conference paper? What exactly does it mean? It’s a wonderful expression to use when you don’t know exactly what you want to say.

Just out of interest, I saw an item saying that September 24 was “officially National Punctuation Day, and we’re sure that you’re planning to celebrate by wearing “period” costumes and tossing back a few exclamation “pints.” Thank you to Brad Tuttle of Money for that. Now, there’s a most laudable initiative. Punctuation is a matter of precision.

Confusion, all is confusion

Last time, I wrote about men’s and women’s language and since then I have come across some surprising items in the press. Instead of enthusiastic reporting, the following, published in The Express on 11th August, should have been roundly criticised: John Hennigan made the mistake of calling Judge Patricia Lynch, QC, a “c***” as she jailed him for 18 months. In measured tones, Judge Lynch replied: “You’re a bit of a c*** yourself. Being offensive to me doesn’t help.” Hennigan, 50, shouted: “Go f*** yourself!” Judge Lynch simply retorted: “You too.” Instead, the judge seems to have gained a reputation as a no-nonsense member of the judiciary who puts offenders well and truly in their place. Nonsense, she should be reprimanded and told to uphold the dignity of the law.

Not only language, but feminine matters are becoming invasive, too. There was also a detailed article about the clitoris in Le Figaro recently, not just text, oh no, but photos to boot. I know it’s a French publication, but… And lunch-time television adverts seem frequently to be about creams to relieve various irritations that only afflict women. This does nothing for my appetite and makes me think that soon Big Pharma may start to demonstrate the efficacy of their potions on ED, with graphic illustrations of course; now that would liven things up a bit at midday.

Another article in the Daily Mail related how a transgender woman found romance with a man who also changed sex. This really is a most confusing area. LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. The word ‘sex’ as an administrative category on forms seems to be destined to disappear and to be replaced by ‘gender’ which used to be a grammatical term. Sex and gender in grammar and sociolinguistics were used to refer to different things. The debate in the United States at both federal and state level about which lavatories should be used by different people depending on whether they were born male or female but also whether they felt they really belonged to the other sex or neither of those, is going to lead us where? Administrative forms, censuses for example, will they show in future Male, Female, Other (please give details)? What will these details be? What proof will be needed? What will happen to comparative statistics? Will there be universal acceptance of three, or more, sexes? Will same sex marriages become the new normal?

The BBC ran a headline yesterday: “Transgender soldier becomes first woman on Army front line”. The article goes on to explain that the soldier joined the Scots Guards as a man in 2012 but began hormone therapy in the last month, and has officially changed her name. The Army said it was delighted to have its first woman in a close-combat role. The Guardsman, who had official documents changed by deed poll from her birth name of Ben to reflect her new name and status, has now been informed she will be able to stay in the infantry, as a woman. The BBC uses neither the term ‘sex’ nor ‘gender’, but ‘status’. Confusing?

That George Sand was in fact the pseudonym of Amandine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, a nineteenth century lady writer who fought for women’s independence, is well known. That Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris, historian, author and travel writer is perhaps less well known. Jan Morris is described as a trans woman who was published under her birth name until 1972, when she transitioned from living as male to living as female. These examples, in their day, were exceptional. There are new vocabulary items specifically created, such as “trans” woman and the verb to “transition”, which the OED dates to 1993. Nowadays, the sheer number of people involved, the various sexes, genders, statuses generated, leave many people unable to comprehend.

This situation in society will have to be reflected socio-linguistically. What I started by describing as men’s and women’s language reflects social evolution that is not really very complicated, in fact it’s rather trivial; it’s simply a matter of standards, of gravitas. The sex/gender question by comparison is a sea-change. It will be interesting to see how society in general and the different generations cope with it.