Am I Too Old to Say Anything New?

I’m co-teaching a writing course later this month, which has meant going through my lecture notes to excise any lines I’d be embarrassed to utter in front of a colleague. One item that got the cut was my advice on impact as a verb. “Don’t use it,” I say, “not because it will cloud your meaning, or because it’s wrong, but to avoid annoying old fogeys.”

The students love “insider” tips like these, but unfortunately it’s dishonest: They’ll be working in the worlds of international business, architecture, engineering, and natural sciences, where the English prescriptivists are few enough in number that even impactful would probably fly under the radar. If I’m honest with myself — half the point of my note-review — the old fogey is me.

And yet I accept that language changes. I like it, even. So why am I resistant to such a widely accepted if relatively novel usage? I’m reminded of a New Yorker piece by Robert Sapolsky in which the author, a neurobiologist, investigates the age at which a person’s appetite for novelty is likely to dwindle — and when our taste for the new vanishes completely. He finds that if you haven’t heard a certain style of music by the time you’re 35, you probably won’t become a fan. You’ve got a longer time window with culinary tastes, and a shorter one when it comes to body art (Sapolsky probed piercings). What about linguistic taste? He didn’t look into it, but we can.

I’ve chosen seven examples of novel language that have emerged in the past 75 years or so, tried to roughly pinpoint when each came into relatively common usage, and put them into a shared Google spreadsheet. My dates might be off, and I welcome your comments and corrections — but note that I’m not looking for Oxford English Dictionary-backed evidence of when a neologism began. Yes, impact was around as a verb in the early 1600s, and yes, there are scattered examples of its use ever since, but according to the Google N-Gram viewer at least, its boom time began in the 1970s.

Anyway, the point of the shared spreadsheet is data collection. If you’re up for taking part, fill in one row with your birthdate and a “Yes” or “No” in each subsequent column, according to whether the language at the top of that column bothers you. Once we have critical mass, we can start looking for patterns.

If you don’t want to click through but are curious about the examples, here they are:

“I slept through the reveal.” (reveal as a noun)
“Could you please xerox this?” (brand name Xerox as a verb)
“The results will impact our decision.” (impact as a verb)
“I’m trying to develop my skillset.” (compound noun skillset)
“My omelet morphed into a scramble.” (morph as a verb outside the context of computer animation)
“Did he medal?” (medal as a verb)
“I’m lowkey annoyed by her response” (lowkey/low-key as an adverb)

I suspect to impact may skew our results, as there’s an additional factor at play: shame. It is one of a handful of usage bogeymen so often criticized that they’re avoided by anyone who pays attention to language, irrespective of age. But that might be changing: Surveys of the American Heritage Dictionary’s approximately 200-person Usage Panel have demonstrated growing acceptance of the transitive version as a verb; in 2001, 80 percent disapproved of it, compared with only half in 2015.

That got me wondering if my living in Germany is the problem — am I nostalgically hanging on to ways of doing things that everyone back home is giving up? Sapolsky’s literature review found possible evidence to the contrary, work by the psychologist Dean Keith Simiton showing that when people switch disciplines, their receptivity to new ideas is reinvigorated. In other words, German ought to be priming me for the likes of TFW and lowkey. Doesn’t feel that way. Maybe old age is simply the stronger force.

Sapolsky was sad about his declining taste for the new, and I feel that way, too. His solution: keep trying. Mine, too, I suppose. Or to put it another way, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.