Just a Little Paranoid

I want to ask a question first. I want to ask it as open-mindedly as I can and that means posing it first because when I start writing about language, I get engaged and that wide-open mental aperture shrinks to the size of a pinhole very quickly.

Let’s put the question narrowly first. What is paranoia? It is, first, a term of psychiatry just as psychosomatic once was. We all saw how that one turned out. “Is it real, Doc, or just psychosomatic?” Paranoia is a mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions as of grandeur or especially of persecution.[1]

If you listen to words, and you probably do or you wouldn’t be reading this, you have heard people say they are “a little paranoid.” I have never heard anyone say that a person is “just a little sociopathic” but if he did say that, it would put the meaning in the same tension with the word that paranoid does.

If we want to talk about the array of words that might show up on the path that led, at its very end, to paranoid, we find that there are a lot of them. A person might be said to be troubled or dubious, or shady. He might be suspicious, or wary, or even fearful. But we don’t want that. We want to take the word at the end of the line and say we have just a little bit of it.

Why do we do that? Don’t know any of the other words? I don’t think so. We use all those words in other contexts. I think we want the pop of the big one—I’m PARANOID—but just the meaning of wary. Is it like getting cranberry juice concentrate and adulterating it with water? Or is it like getting battery acid and diluting it so it is not quite at full strength?

In Oregon recently, there was a political ad opposing something or other and using the slogan, “It’s too extreme!” Hello? Extreme means the very furthest away, the “furthest out,” we might say. But “too extreme?” What does that mean? Would an advocate say, “No, no, they are just saying that to frighten people; actually, it’s only moderately extreme.”?

There is probably a word for words that have that function. I call them “polar words” because they occur only at the pole (the very end) of the range of meanings. You could say that someone is nearly paranoid, I guess and you might be able to say that something is “nearly extreme.”
But those aren’t the only kinds of words where this problem pops up. People don’t use unique as a sliding variable term because they don’t know any others. Anyone who listens or reads comes across “very unique” as if unique meant “different.” Unique mean that there aren’t any others like it.[2] Unique is a polar word. It represents only the very end of the continuum. Is unique so valuable that people draw against it by using it where “different” would be correct? Does calling a new kind of cracker “a little big unique” help sell crackers?

This week, I saw an ad for something—it might have been a new phone—that said they were becoming more ubiquitous all the time.[3] Of course, if it is ubiquitous, there is nowhere else for it to be. Is this like unique and paranoid in that there is a certain pop you get by using the polar terms, even if you have to cut back on the actual meaning? It’s hard to think so. Does ubiquitous have a lot of pop?

Some gentle soul is going to say it is just ignorance, but you notice that all these deviations from established usage move in the same direction. These are not random changes. This is a substantial portion of American English which is being moved in a particular way. That way is that terms that were once “end of the line” terms are now being used as “anywhere along the line” terms.

Which brings us to the question I promised in the first paragraph: Does this really hurt us? Probably not. It is painful to people, like me, who were trained to respect such terms. It is not just their meanings, but their existence as polar terms at all. If all the terms that were once polar, standing at the ends of the axis of meanings, become relative so that they can legitimately be modified by adjective phrases like, “a little,” or “a substantial amount” or even “excessively,” which imagines a “just right” meaning somewhere in the center and says this one is too far out? I don’t think so.

I think people like me—in my previous essay about my perspective on language, I called myself “Conservative and Proud”—will probably serve the language by pointing out what is going on and by raising the question of whether the language suffers (and thereby, all its users suffer) by this new kind of language. So I offer this essay as a reflection on a kind of change I see taking place and I ask whether it is a big deal or just an irritation.

What do you think?

[1] The etymology of a word often adds depth to its array of meanings. Paranoia occurs in a mind, nous, that is para, “beside” itself. We say a person is “beside himself” with grief or with anger, but that just shows that an etymology is not the same as a meaning.
[2] And for those of you who have a theological appetite as well as a lexical one, the Greek monogenēs, which the KJV translates “only begotten,” also means “unique” rather than "only." Isaac, the son of Jacob was monogenēs and had a brother, Ishmael.
[3] The word we could really use is ubiety (yoo-BY-i-ty), which means “the condition of being in a particular place.” This emphasizes its “whereness.” Ubiquitous, by contrast, matches ubi, “where” with que, “any,” giving us not “anywhere,” but “everywhere.”