Let’s resolve to ditch the redundant neologisms

George Orwell wrote that “any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.”

He argued that the decline of a language has political and/or economic causes and that it is irreversible unless you have lots of power and money. Sadly, I have neither. But as this is the time of year for resolutions, how about all of us resolving to do our own little bits to thwart the decline of civilisation by upholding accurate and efficient language usage?

I exaggerate the stakes, you say? But what about all those interviewees who answer broadcasters’ questions with “absolutely” or “100 per cent” – or, even worse, “110 per cent”. Does such hyperbole even confer the desired emphasis any longer, now that it has become so mundane?

There is perhaps a sense in which such answers are sympathetic attempts to endorse the thrust of the interviewer’s question. Indeed, some questions – and statements – actively solicit such endorsements by adding what the sociolinguist Basil Bernstein referred to as statements of sympathetic circularity. In my home city of Liverpool, a very common example used to be “D’ye know worra mean, like?”.

As elsewhere, that phrase is now typically shortened to “Ye know?”, while “like” has taken on a whole new life of its own, gumming up young people’s every sentence with redundancy and repetition. I recently overheard a conversation between two young women in which one said: “Like, I was, like, deciding whether to, like, like him or not and he, like, said he didn’t, like, like me any more.” Both were comfortable with the exchange. Evidently the circularity was sympathetic and, on those grounds, just about tolerable – at least for them.

Recently, I have become ever more irked by redundancy (and I am not talking about all the job losses, though they are bad too). It verges on heresy for a social scientist to say this, but my biggest bugbear is “lived experience”. Now I understand the phenomenological roots of the phrase and the epistemic rationale for its application, enhancing the value of the anecdote. But one finds it everywhere now.

The Wellcome Trust, for example, has a global team of lived experience advisers who shape their mental health strategy: “Lived experience experts should self-identify as having lived experience,” its website explains. But isn’t that tautological? Moreover, aren’t all experiences “lived”? I am still waiting for someone to claim an “unlived” experience – unless those we read about in books count? Can’t we just assume that experiences only happen to people who are living and drop the “lived” bit?

In the health and care field, I also wonder whether there is any difference between lived experience advising and the older concept of patient and public involvement (PPI), the practice of actively including patients, carers and the public in the development, design and delivery of services and research. Has PPI somehow just become a stale phrase?

A more serious abuse of scholarship, in my view, is the repeated use of the term “ecosystem” for something we used to simply understand as a “system”. An ecosystem is defined as a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. The term was first applied to social and cultural systems by the American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, who intended it to stress the importance of understanding human interactions and influences within their natural environments – but subsequent scholars have followed him in understanding “environment” primarily in economic, political, organisational and cultural terms.

I suspect the New Materialists would stress here that all systems are necessarily “ecologically influenced”. But if that is so, the “eco” bit becomes redundant and we could return to the classical social scientists’ interest in “‘systems”, only referring to an ecosystem when there is an explanatory value gained from understanding physical influences.

A similar example is “use case”. Most of the European Commission projects I advise on use the term frequently. My helpful AI adviser defines a use case as: “a description of how a person or system interacts with a product, service or system to achieve a specific goal.” So I am left wondering how that differs from a “case” – or a “case study”.

Even more recently I came across the idea of “user-stories”: “brief, informal descriptions of a feature from a user’s perspective, focusing on their goal and the value it provides”. But how are these different from the “case histories” I used to look for – which could be a more or less detailed account of a user’s experience?

I do not oppose linguistic change per se. I enjoy experimentations with language – but not just to invent a phrase or word for which we already possess a perfectly adequate term. A shiny new neologism might give an impression of progress, but that impression is illusory if the term connotes exactly the same concept as a previous term.

So if you have any sympathy with this user-story of my lived experience in the research ecosystem, do please think before adopting the next clunky new academic buzzphrase. D’ye know worra mean, like?

Ron Iphofen is an independent research consultant.