The Biological Dictionary For Dummies

I have a theory that our culture is nothing more than a series of misunderstandings of everyone and everything that came before us. What I mean is that we misunderstand the civilization we are born into and as we grow older we help create something that is different than what we were born into.

Take, for example, the concept of theme. In most literary forms, a theme is the main idea or opinion a work embodies. A work may have more than one theme, of course, but usually one idea predominates. But according to my students’ essays, ‘theme’ is interchangeable with ‘subject,’ ‘motif,’ ‘mood,’ ‘topic,’ ‘style,’ ‘setting,’ and even, I suspect, ‘peanut butter and jam’ or ‘Kraft dinner’ if they’ve been at work too long without eating. In reality, “Love” is not a theme. “Love sucks” is. (Ok – not a very interesting or thought provoking theme for sure.) And a movie can’t have a fish out of water theme – but it can have a fish out of water motif.

The confusion comes at my students from all sides. I hear and read the same mistakes every day from countless shows, newspapers, magazines, and even from teachers. At a certain point I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m remembering things correctly myself.

Imprecision is the kind of thing that George Orwell railed about in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” and I guess I’m railing a bit now too. It doesn’t matter – change overtakes all of us. I look at how he criticized people who used to say “to have an impact on” when all they needed to say was “affect.” I wonder what he would think if he heard people simply replacing “affect” with “impact” as in, “He impacted the situation”? – which, by the way, is like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Terms simply change and maybe it’s useless to fight. But I can’t help it. Watching Attack of the Show the other day on G4 Tech TV, I heard a panel of people talking about cult films and whether or not Snakes on a Plane would qualify as one. One guy argued that you couldn’t know unless the film flopped because a cult film has to fail initially. Another guy argued, though, that Star Wars never flopped and was an instant cult classic. Imagine kicking a row of ten cars to set off at least five different types of car alarm. That’s what went through my head when I heard that.

One of the guys on the show started for me by arguing that a cult film has a small fanatical following, so Star Wars, due to the size of its fan base, could never be a cult film. But the other guy shot back saying the fans for the film were like religious devotees, therefore it was a cult film. But, no, I shot back to the screen, that would make Star Wars a religion, not a cult. And it probably just about is, as far as I can tell.

But I could feel the term ‘cult’ slipping from my grasp as younger film fans can hear in the word something religious, but not something small. Meanings change. Mistakes turn into orthodoxy.

That’s why the word classic, as misused above, has changed as well. It’s a case of partial understanding of the word. People think of classic and they think “great”. Once upon a time, classic embodied “old” as well. The notion of an instant classic implies that something is instantly great, but it also implies, to my ear, that something is instantly centuries or at least decades old.

The most important thing I’ve learned about this, though, is not that civilization is going to hell. It’s that I can’t stop myself from feeling irritated by the changes. Someday I imagine myself unable to communicate with others around me. A fish not so much out of water, but in an old folks aquarium, an object of curiosity. Even now I’m looking at an old dictionary I keep around to remind me of how language leaves us all behind. It dates back to Orwell’s favorite year, 1984. There is no “internet,” “DVD,” “cyberspace” (in fact, “cyber” prefixes words dealing with robotics here), and words like “virus,” “crash,” and “virtual” have taken on new meanings. So am I just a biological dictionary that can’t keep up?

My only consolation is that I, in my stubbornness, will continue facing the students who represent the new ways of speaking, and they will continue to be martyred for the right to speak the language as they think it should be spoken because, for now, I’m the one with the marking pen. (The theme of this piece, by the way, is that we all cope with change as best we can, though most often by taking revenge on its proponents in print.)