A Living Language

I don’t know whether language is “living,” as some say, but I do know that language users are living. They have preferences about meanings of words; they have preferences about the ease of communication. And, ordinarily, they will act on those preferences.

So let’s begin by asking, as President Bartlet asked of a “proportional response,” in the first season of The West Wing, “What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why is it good?" In the context of military retaliation, it’s an interesting question, but today I just want to look at the word virtue. It derives from the Latin vir = man; that’s man as in a male human. Derivatively, a virtue is manliness of some sort and by extension a valued quality of some sort. So, laying the etymology aside, a virtue is “moral excellence; right action and thinking; goodness or morality.”

Since I first learned of this derivation, I have had quite a few quiet smiles about stories that feature young women losing “their virtue” only because "losing their manliness" seems so discrepant in that context. In fact, in some cultures, boys gain their “virtue” in the same act and at the same moment that the girls lose theirs. Isn’t language wonderful?

I got to thinking of this when a Rose Festival Princess—for those of you who don’t live in Portland, RFP is a big deal—told about how she put aside the views of all those people who criticized her for the way she looked and declared herself to be beautiful. I have nothing but respect for her courage in standing up for herself, but I think she is going to have to share the language with people who have meant other things by that word for many years now.

The Princess said, ““I broke through my shell and learned that I am beautiful not because I am glamorous and perfect, but because I am a strong, intelligent, confident and capable young woman.” That is a perfectly adequate meaning of the word for internal speech, but when she starts talking to other people, and particularly if she wants to be understood, she is going to have to look at that word again. Will people use the word beauty to mean “strong, intelligent, confident, and capable young woman?” No. They won’t.

I have seen panels of legislators browbeaten until they were willing to call every failure “a challenge” and every disabled person a “differently abled person.” But when the browbeating witness had departed, eyes were collectively rolled and the word that was used in the statutes being discussed was used again. Challenge is now used as “challenge,” and given a little ironic stress so that the coach who calls falling behind in the first half by 45-12 a “challenge” will not be taken by the interviewer or the television audience to be an idiot. It will be “a challenge” for us, says the coach, with that little facial twitch that serves as “air-quotes.”

The users of language are living and they respond to impediments by surmounting them or finding new paths. If, ten years from now, there are “beauty contests,” to see which young women are most strong, most intelligent, most confident, and most capable, there will be some other contest—called something else, surely—for those women who meet that culture’s standards for physical attractiveness.

Sometimes you just can’t make people use words the way you would like and I say that as someone who has often tried and sometimes succeeded. I do have a thought experiment for you, though. One of my practices has been to collect English words that mean “of, by, or pertaining to [some kind of animal].” So I can talk about the feline qualities of cats or the hirsine qualities of goats or the vulpine qualities of foxes. By the same logic, I can speak of the anatine qualities of ducks and could even, with conventional rules in use, speak of “anatinity,” a noun referring to those anatine qualities. Puddles (below) has anatinity, as evidenced by the pushups he did during the football season--one for every accumulated point and this year, there were a lot of accumulated points.


It’s a little quirky, maybe a little word-wonky, but I wouldn’t get a lot of pushback from it. Eye-rolling, maybe. But now let’s say I use anatine in place of virtue. I emphasize the value of “duckliness” rather than the value of “manliness.” If I had enough power and if I were willing to expend it in forcing people to say that an athlete, say, had “deeply anatine qualities” meaning that he or she was a good player, I could get away with it for the moment. It might even compete with "intestinal fortitude."

But in Oregon, where one of the most prominent meanings of Duck is “not a Beaver,” it would be a very hard sell and I don't want to be the one to try it.