July 25, 2012
Zombie Nouns
Helen Sword in NYTimes' Opinionator:
Take an adjective (implacable) or a verb (calibrate) or even another noun (crony) and add a suffix like ity, tion or ism. You’ve created a new noun: implacability, calibration, cronyism. Sounds impressive, right?
Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings:
The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.
The sentence above contains no fewer than seven nominalizations, each formed from a verb or an adjective. Yet it fails to tell us who is doing what.
More here.
Posted by Henry Molofsky at 09:42 AM | Permalink
Comments
George Orwell is smiling down from heaven.
Posted by: Shelley | Jul 25, 2012 6:46:21 PM
Judging from the comments appearing in the NYT in response to this article, there is a great deal of interest in the effects of ponderous language on our ability to understand one another. What is less evident is any widespread concern about what such language does to our own thinking processes. Thinking clearly should precede communicating clearly. The additional cost of the nominalizations described in the article is that, in using them, we encourage the idea that there are large abstract forces that influence us; they diminish our awareness of ourselves as actors. Easier to continue our blustering on the edge of the abyss rather than think more clearly about what to do about it . . .?
Posted by: John Deakins | Jul 25, 2012 7:38:46 PM
I'm Southern and I was born to an extremely florid vocabulary. My mother said "defenestrate" as naturally as other people say they'll have a Coke. This is pretty harmless in speech, and counts more as a regionalism than an attempt at the hifalutin. But once you write it -- well, you don't. If you speak and write good English, you will find you are using anglo-saxonisms wherever you can. If you are editing something you wrote, you will make an instant difference for the better by touching them in wherever you see a latinate word that makes you squirm.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 26, 2012 12:08:36 AM
Fun piece! Thanks!
In my opinion, the English language owes its soul to its ancient Anglo-Saxon roots. Once, much like modern German, one would build new nouns by stringing together existing nouns into long compounds. I love the Echoes of this can be found in wonderful translation of Beowulf by Seamus Heany and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, for example.
I had a wonderful English teacher in high-school who drilled into us this lesson on writing clearly: "never use a big word when a small one will do!" I still think it is a good rule...
Posted by: Bill | Jul 26, 2012 4:30:08 AM
For some reason, the my browser chopped one of my sentences.. "I love the.." was meant to be: "I love the sound of such words like `ring-giver', `slaughter-shaft', edge-thane' and the masterful alliteration and rhyming that becomes possible using this form."
Posted by: Bill | Jul 26, 2012 4:35:48 AM
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