Martin Amis talks about words confused and misused, how words frequently alter their hues etc.

friendship and christopher hitchens said he'd never seen a father and son get on as easily as i did with my father but um he did he did reproach me uh about with some asperity and malice when if ever i made a grammatical mistake in book reviews which i which i started off with in my early twenties and he'd say he'd say at breakfast because i still used to go and spend every other weekend in his house um he said you you know about your enormity in the observer do you and i thought christ what's this and i knew enormity meant something very bad and not something very big um and and there were a couple of really bad ones i mean i used marshall m-a-r-t-i-a-l as a verb not very good and he i've never forgotten this um he reproached me and i'm i'm pretty sure that maybe half of you use this word in this sense um [Music] which is it's become the meaning of the word which is you can't stop usage no power on earth can can reverse a change that's made in the language you i mean people who say who used to say they don't say it anymore but this there were old comedians he used to say i reject the use of the word gay for homosexual and demand it back for heterosexual use it's not going to work um but i said i described some critics attack on a on another critic as his infamous crucifixion of so-and-so [Music] and kingsley said you leave no doubt what you thought of it meaning that i was saying it was a it was a infamous used to mean evil abominable now it just means it means notorious or not even that just means famous now um [Music] the england manager with his infamous umbrella because he stood under it during a downpour which was considered a bit wimpy uh it's it's amazing to watch this sort of thing happening where it looks like a fancy addition to the language infamous meaning notorious of ill fame [Music] but in fact it's it's a subtraction to the language for anyone who cares about words because i would never you can't use it out of um through ambiguity same goes for decimate which used to which used to mean it was a a punishment in the roman army that you killed one man in 10. now you read people saying he totally decimated the the ranks it means nominees more like nine out of ten nearly obliterated and it's a loss to the language it's not an addition um the the best example he gives is deja vu which um you ask anyone what that means and it says it's something that's happened before um and politicians use it all and journalists use it all to it is with a distinct sense of deja vu that one listens to so-and-so's excuses about meaning we've heard it before and but deja vu means funnily enough it means it describes something that you haven't experienced before and what it describes is that funny romantic wistful youthful feeling very much connected with for instance first love where you see someone and you have a sense of deja vu and what it means is you think you've seen them before whereas you provably haven't seen them before or you go to a place that feels resonant in a strange way and it's it's a little bit of um romantic displacement in your mind where suddenly everything seems charged and significant and it feels like you've seen it before but in fact that's the point is that you haven't seen it before but you make the point that there's no way to bring these words back into proper usage that that once this has happened the people who are arguing for them to return to proper usage are it's a lost cause a waste of breath um and that's how it should be that's how language evolves and if if if those people who want the word gay back for heterosexual use had their way um the language would die of purity like medieval latin unlike uh ancient latin or classical latin which died of impurity you you've got to you've got to hold on to the meanings of words for as long as you can and and then cease to use them when they become ambiguous it's it's you know only a small fraction of uh the population cares about it and only quite a small fraction of writers care about this sort of thing but it i think it's um i certainly care about it probably just um out of uh filial obedience to my father um but it's a way of distinguishing a writer who's careful and a writer who doesn't really bother that much

Channel: Evan Davis

Views: 2,121

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Id: 4OxjXlJmujY

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020