Pandemic Vocabulary Fatigue

By Jenna Remley

    

    People have strong feelings about even the most inane words - a shudder when hearing ‘moist,’ an annoyance with ‘like’ being used as a filler, a righteous anger at the redundancy of ‘irregardless.’ But over the past year, I have come to have visceral reactions to saying, reading, and using particular words like never before. My internal response to certain terms might be called ‘unprecedented,’ but that’s actually one of the words that makes me flinch.

 

    Here’s a game I used to play sometimes as a child - you pick a word, and you say it over and over again. You say it so much that it loses its wordness. It is no longer a meaningful utterance, attached to a real object or concept, but has become gibberish through overuse. Even though you know that it is a word, you can’t make it feel like one anymore.

    This is a process most well-known as ‘semantic satiation.’ Leon James, the professor who coined that term, described it as a form of fatigue - your brain cells get tired of continually connecting that particular word with its particular meaning, and if you tire them out enough, they stop making the connection.

 

    Even when you can still feel the meaning of a word or phrase, overusing it can depreciate its impact and value. This happens when once-brilliant metaphors become used so often that people no longer register them as figurative language - a process called ‘literalization,’ which creates ‘dead metaphors.’ A friend of mine once pointed out that the first time someone described cold as biting, it must have been a revelation. How shocking it must have been to read that, and to understand that the cold air could have teeth, that it could pierce your skin and hurt in a sharp, immediate way. Now, you’ve likely heard the phrase ‘biting cold’ enough that it no longer has half the effect on you it once might have. Or consider the phrase “falling in love.” There is nothing literal that connects the feeling of strong affection or romance to the sensation of falling - it’s an ingenious comparison that highlights the weightless, vulnerable, unpredictable, and seemingly unstoppable feeling of infatuation. But I can say that two people “fell in love” with the utmost casualness, with no intention of poetry - the metaphor has died. ‘Dead metaphor’ itself might be considered a dead metaphor.

    This Atlantic article also considers the overuse of corporate buzzwords, how concepts and phrases become ubiquitous enough that they no longer signify the remarkable concepts they once represented. The overuse of these terms for seemingly-extraordinary ideas in mundane contexts makes people hate them, even as they have to keep using them in their field.

 

    The other day a coworker said to me, “if I have to hear the word ‘accountability’ again, I’ll lose it.” And I totally understood what they meant - that at every meeting, in every email, we are reminded of our ‘accountability’ as a school, our need to keep track of students and make sure they are still engaging with the curriculum during distance learning. I also knew that, despite how much we wanted to cringe each time we heard that word, we would continue hearing it, and saying it, because it was an unavoidable part of our jobs.

    ‘Accountability’ and ‘unprecedented’ are entries in an ever-growing list of words and phrases that have started to grate against me. Others include ‘social distance,’ ‘pod,’ ‘lockdown,’ ‘WFH,’ ‘quarantine,’ ‘essential,’ and ‘challenging times.’ Sometimes just ‘COVID’ itself pisses me off. These words are used, and used, and used again. My brain is tired of connecting them to their meanings. The whole situation is so overwhelming, so all-encompassing, so obvious that it feels trite and stupid to talk about it, and yet what else is there to talk about? These words are so frequently used that they feel meaningless, and yet so present and necessary that their meaning feels like a slap in the face. You can be vague, referring to ‘the current situation’ or ‘the ongoing unpleasantness,’ but this feels like cheating somehow, like politely brushing under the rug something that so many people are suffering from. It is universally-understood, and yet it must be acknowledged. 

    I constantly feel that if I have to hear or say something like ‘socially distanced’ one more time, I will lose it. And yet I will hear it, and I must use it. I hope that in the not-too-distant future these words will not be as necessary, and can fade into less frequent use. Until then I must continue stumbling forward, brain cells firing lethargically, armed only with words that I hate and yet need.