A friend said to me this week that she “resonated with” something I’d said. I kept talking and smiling and hoped she hadn’t seen me flinch, but I was inwardly dismayed. I’ve been around, and teaching English, long enough to see many verbal trends come and go, and to know that we should celebrate the growth and change of language, but it doesn’t always come naturally. It’s one thing to hear students “resonating with” each other’s ideas – the classroom reverberating, on a good day, they’d hear it in Wales – another when it’s my own generation.
I don’t want to be a curmudgeon (there’s an underused word). I try to be benignly curious about how words come, increasingly suddenly, into fashion, usually with a meaning that’s not quite the one they used to have. There’s no reason why all this resonating should be worse than echoing, which we’ve been hearing in meetings for decades. “I want to echo what John just said” usually means “I want 10 minutes of airtime for myself and also to suck up to John so I’m going to repeat his point.” Resonating seems faster. I worry, pointlessly, that maybe some speakers don’t realise that the resonance is metaphorical, that the word has its own literal meaning to do with the repetition of sound and doesn’t just mean “to share experience”. There’s no reason it should matter, really.
The use of “literally” as an all-purpose intensifier is more annoying, because it’s not metaphorical but simply untrue. Overheard in a cafe last week, one middle-aged woman to two others: “My heart was literally in my boots.” “Figuratively”, I wanted to interrupt, or if not, the interesting part of the story – the bit involving heroic cardiothoracic surgery – is surely not the story the woman was telling.
Last year I told my writing class that no one should use the term “performative” without having read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, and that when they said “performative” they almost always meant “ostentatious”. (Performative has an earlier meaning in sociolinguistics but became popular after Butler’s book.) The students grinned and made notes. There was a lot of ostentation in the following week’s writing.
To normalise invective against cyclists is to miss the point spectacularly
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I’m sure middle-aged writers and scholars have been objecting to linguistic change since Aristotle, who worried that students’ dependence on writing would impair their memories. He was probably right. I remember being chided – there’s another nice old word, though I suspect the past participle should be chidden – for ending a sentence with a preposition, and to this day I mutter “to whom should I give the wine?” because I can’t bear to say “who should I give the wine to?” but I know I’m pretty much the last whom-user left standing. (Feel free to write in, of course.) I used to tell students, if you know how to use he and him, you know how to use who and whom; they’re all Anglo-Saxon pronouns in the same pattern. These days I’m sometimes happily surprised by the correct use of me and I; people overcorrect and say “Sarah gave the wine to John and I”, though I’ve yet to hear “Sarah gave the wine to I”.
I know it’s all fine. I know that language, especially a global language like English, blossoms and flourishes. I know stasis is death, and, anyway, policing – hmm, when did that become a verb? − other people’s speech is both pointless and unattractive.
I know that the English language is by nature, or at least by history and culture, a messy and slipshod system. It doesn’t make sense and the rules don’t hold. The orthography is absurd – plough, through, cough – and there are irregular verbs and plural nouns that make more but not entire sense if you happen to know the various underlying languages. Swim, swam, swum; sing, sang, sung. Roof, rooves; handkerchief, handkerchieves, but chief, chiefs.
Each wave of immigrants to what’s now Britain left another layer: not much from the Picts, Latin from the Romans, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse from the Vikings, Norman French from the Norman conquerors, rotating European monarchs and courtiers, centuries of global pillaging and trade. English was the composite tongue of a composite people even before it was remade by the calls and responses of empire. It was never pure or logical and the rules we learn are only the latest handbook. For literary purposes at least, wildness should be welcome.
Still, if you resonate with this, especially if you literally resonate with this, please don’t tell me.
