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Not long ago I got caught up in the word "depressed". I used it, but hastened to add that I wasn't at all depressed nor did I want to be depressed, and that I disliked identifying with a clinical picture while all I was trying to do was describe a frame of mind for which a wide variety of perfectly adequate words were available such as miserable, sad, dejected, gloomy or down in the dumps. In short, I caught myself committing a serious linguistic offence: that of language corruption, and wondered whether it had been inspired by the tendency to go for "big" words to lend extra weight and attract attention, or by sheer laziness. Take "paranoid", for example, as a word that is used all the time these days as if it were synonymous with suspicious, wary or frustrated even though paranoia actually describes a serious mental condition, or "neurotic" - although a neurosis is a grave psychological disorder, nine times out of ten the word "neurotic" is used to describe fanatical or jittery behaviour. However, bearing in mind the recent report about the percentage of people who still have faith in the authorities having dropped from 65 to 45 over a three-year period in this country, it somehow didn't sound at all odd when next I heard someone say that those neurotic politicians were making him paranoid, even though - and here I have to emphasise the gravity of the matter - both this statement and the politicians would be just about enough to make me feel depressed, annoyed as I am at being tempted to resort to such a simplistic choice of words, from which you may conclude that the wrong word and the wrong feeling sometimes go together. |