good

When you look at the English language it often becomes hard to avoid one fundamental problem. Namely, that we have a beautifully rich abundance of words with which we can work, play, build upon and adapt and yet the words that make it out of the dictionary and into our mouths are a very select number. We are barely skimming the surface of the language we have on offer and this is a real shame.

English is a fascinating language and one which has evolved for thousands of years. Some of our words can be traced to Rome by their latin roots, some to the Scandinavian tongues of Viking raiders and traders, the French provided a buffet of language at which ate quite heartily before we gorged ourselves on all of the words we learnt through shipping, trade and empire. This list barely scratches the petals of the the flower of our language, the roots go very deep and all around the globe which is what makes our language so delicate, interesting and so hard to learn in all its intricate forms.

As if that bounty were not enough, the internet provides us with instant access to virtually every word written or spoken around the globe. With a few keystrokes you could be reading my words in German or Farsi and watching highly sophisticated computing completely fail to understand the rules and nuances that are the real meaning of my words. You can see other languages, see what words they share, pick out traces of grammar and learn new words which you can use, adapt yourself and work into you own language make-up.

This malleable development process is a delight and, though I will certainly be accused of pedantry for future posts, something which is integral to the language and which should be embraced.

However, some of these new words are grey squirrels. They are brought into the language and they eat away at the variety of words we have readily on our tongues. Rather than working alongside existing words and adding a new dimension or flavour to a sentence, they replace the existing words and gradually those words fall out of favour.

At this stage it is popular to blame the youth and their access to media which does make them culpable for some of the mediocrity of language. For instance the word 'good'. It is a perfectly acceptable word to denote positivity or mild praise and its weakness denotes a satisfactory state of affairs, as opposed to 'fabulous', 'magnificent' or 'brilliant' which are clearly more emotive endorsements. 'Good' has, however, overstepped its boundaries and I have a sneaking suspicion that this may the work of another perennial language culprit - the americanism.

Food, for instance. I have witnessed entire conversations about food with 'good' as the only adjective. These people were, in essence, determining the level of 'good' which could be attributed to their food and this is not an acceptable way to discuss it. If the discussion were to be focussing mathematically on the calorific intake provided by the food, that is a quantifiable figure and so 'good' would be allowed, in the same way that 'good' is an acceptable response to the ever popular adult question 'how are the figures looking?'.

The experience of eating, however, is highly qualitative because it includes millions of different taste sensations of sweetness, salt, bitterness, sourness and umami in combination with texture and temperature and moisture and viscosity and acidity and aroma and colour and 'good' is not enough to encapsulate that. It gives no information.

What is worse, however, is that by using 'good' we sacrifice the opportunity to use any of the thousands of adjectives in the English language that can be used to assess the previously ranted factors that make up a food experience. We lose the chance to really describe the quality of the experience and relay that to others. I have never read a food review consisting of the single word 'good', it would be pretty insulting to the chef. As this is the internet, in a wild feat of ridiculous conjecture, I will speculate that within a year we will live in a world where everything is considered 'good' or 'not good'.

The youth, however, is not solely to blame and 'good' is just an example of how easy it can become to forget language. Management-speak very quickly washes over the true descriptors of the language with bland, generic and soulless terms, marketing bods have numbed us to the real value of varied lexis in an effort to sell everything to everyone and politics is desperately keen to remove all meaning and substance from words in case a politician is heard to express anything.

We have a fantastic range of words at our disposal. Let's use them, all of them, for the purpose for which they were intended. Some of them have travelled from history to be available to us and it is not fair to drain them of value or ignore them such that they become redundant.

As a final note, I am very sorry if this blog is 'good'.