The corruption of English
I’d heard he had started a fistfight in one of the seedier local taverns because someone had insisted on saying the word “utilize” instead of “use”.
In The Wise Man’s Fear, the main character Kvothe once started a fistfight because someone insisted on saying utilize instead of use. This was very funny to me, and while I wouldn’t start any fistfights over it, I understand the impulse. Here’s a short rant about English and its misuses from my point of view.
The military-industrial word complex is a good place to start. The military-office slang that has escaped into normal speech. People say vector and payload and leverage to make them sound cooler? Or they are just mimicking their favorite podcaster? None of this adds precision or is necessary. We can just not do it.
Another common pattern I dislike is the way English turns people into balance-sheet items. We say somebody is “worth” $1 billion, and nobody even notices how odd that is. German feels slightly more sane here. You’d say someone hat eine Milliarde (has a billion), not that they’re worth it. The person has the money; the money doesn’t define the person. English skips that distinction entirely.
Then there’s AI English. It’s everywhere now, and once you notice it, you start seeing it in emails, student work, LinkedIn posts, and all the other places prose goes to die. What’s interesting to me is that it is technically “competent”, yet it still feels soulless. Sam Kriss wrote a very good New York Times Magazine piece on this. The problem, in my view, is that these patterns are leaking into how people write (and talk?!), even when no model is involved.