Act 1: Pygmalion

Raging on Language

These Words Are So Overused Their Meaningless

English IV (AP): The Rhetoric of Language and Composition—Wesley

Summative Assessment: 100 Points

Language Rant

Creative Essay

“Definition” Argumentative Essay

Due Date(s):  

                        Rough Draft: (Printed for class) Thursday, 9/29

                        Final Draft:    Monday, 10-3 and submitted to turnitin.com

Length:           1 ½  -2 ½  pages typed, Times New Roman 12 pt. Font

Creative Essay Prompt:

Select a word or short phrase that is used today that you believe is unique, overused, odd, or even crazy and write a 1 ½  - 2 ½  page argument/commentary/observation/analysis about how or why this word is used and what it says about people, the impact of language, society, or modern life in general. You might want to begin by examining the history or etymology of the word as well as the similarities and differences between its denotative and connotative meaning. However, the main goal is to use this word as a pathway into a larger, more provocative and complex issue or topic. You will be graded on your ability to establish your credibility/authorial voice, as well as on how you showcase your unique observations, connections, examples, comparisons, play on words, and ultimately, your critical thinking conveyed through language.

Thesis Proposal (Due Tomorrow):

Please write your thesis proposal using the lines below. This proposal should not only include the word or phrase that you will examine, but must also include the LARGER TOPIC that your analysis/essay will spin or pivot into in order to examine culture/people/society, the impact of language, or modern life in general. Finally, this proposal must be accepted in order to continue on with the next phase of the essay.

Word/Phrase That will Lend Itself into a Larger Discussion:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Big Topic/Analysis that you will Pivot Into & Examine: _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Former Senior AP Student Example (not great, but pretty good)

This is an Essay, Obviously

             I have similar feelings about garlic and the word obviously — both are wonderful in moderation. Use too much of either however, and your speech, like garlic laden breath, is intolerable and repulsive. The excess use of the word obviously in the everyday vernacular found in many Americans is making our language conceited, pretentious, and more annoying than ever before.

            In a weak attempt to sound intelligent, many people use the word obviously as a space-filler or to make them sound more educated, instead of saying “um” or “like” while they try to gather their thoughts. The word obviously is used fairly often, yet there are very few situations where the word obviously is applicable, such as when something is actually “obviously” easy to understand. However, this rampant and unruly use of the term obviously is not only annoying, but it also leads to the defilement of the word’s meaning.

            The greatest sin against obviously is how often it is misused.  While the Oxford Dictionary defines obviously as, “a way that is easily perceived or understood,” it is not always portrayed this way. Because of the widespread use of the word, many people now see the term obviously as more of an exclamation. The Urban Dictionary or guru of slang definitions defines obviously as a synonym of, “Duh” and as, “a maddening cliché.” The irony of the situation is that in order to sound more intelligent, we have degraded a word’s definition. 

            The competition to sound intelligent is magnified with social arenas like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media monsters, making it easy for people to spread their ideas, and more importantly their opinions.  Now, our culture is always connected, with people seemingly constantly trying to outduel each other with put-downs or intellectual posturing.  Opinions are voiced excessively and often in a competitive manner, as people try to assert their intellectual superiority over one another.  A common way to ensure that your opinions sound smarter than someone else’s is to simply try to diminish their opinions. Obviously is usually a pawn in this game. While talking to a friend a few days ago, I asked her how she liked the movie adaptation of the young adult book Divergent.  Her response was, rashly, “You obviously didn’t read the books if you liked the movie.”  By adding that “obviously” to her sentence, the whole tone of our conversation shifted from informative to condescending.  She made it be known that she was truly the authority of the books series, and that anyone who disagreed with her obviously didn’t know what they were talking about.  This only highlights the trend that in this day and age people think that the only opinions that matter are their own.  It is sad that people think that only their ideals are the correct ones.

            Like the amount of garlic that my grandmother uses while cooking the traditional Ukrainian dinner during Christmas, the word obviously is immensely overused.  And while you are forced to grow accustomed to them, you know in your heart that everyone would be better off without the surplus use of either of them.  In part due to people’s desire and in part due to ignorance about the word’s actual meaning, the word obviously has lost all of its true meaning.  Obviously. 

Professional Example # 1

I Am Not Adorable, So Please Stop Calling Me That

Ann Brenoff Senior Writer/Columnist, The Huffington Post

There’s lots of discussion these days about what to call people as they grow older. Nobody likes “elderly”; “senior” and “senior citizen” are a scant improvement over “elderly”; and we can argue til the cows come home exactly what “older person” means. I’m fine with using my actual age as a descriptor. I’m a “64-year-old.” Period.

What I’m not fine with is being called “adorable.”

Spending a good deal of my day online, I see people my age and older being called “adorable” all the time. “Adorable” is a word that is best applied to babies and puppies. To my ear, it’s a diminishment of what I’ve accomplished, and doesn’t show the respect for my age and experience that I would prefer you show me. Granted, I’m not one of those grandparents who dances on YouTube, but still, I’ve been called “adorable” for making something as simple as a kind gesture to someone younger.

To wit, I recently made a special dish for a friend’s daughter and she thanked me by shrieking how “adorable” I was for doing this.

A simple “Thanks. This was so nice of you!” would have felt better to me. Instead of just thanking me she praised my behavior. She might as well have told me that I did a “good job” in her best kindergarten teacher’s voice.

Sure there are worse things people can say. And certainly worse things people could do. No, this isn’t world peace we’re talking about here. More like generational peace. With maybe only me.

I get that younger people use “adorable” when they think something is sweet. So, yeah, grandparents dancing like nobody is watching (except the person who will record it and post it to YouTube with the title “These Adorable Grandparents Will Warm Your Heart” ) and boom! It goes viral.

Who even knows if they are actually grandparents? Not everyone over 60 is, you know. As for the dancing fools, why not just leave them be? They are having fun, probably could care less what the Internet thinks, and most likely fought in wars for our freedom or did something else that deserves more respect than to be called “adorable.”

“Adorable” is nothing more or less than just one of those terms that Millennials overuse. I asked a bunch of friends my age whether they minded being called “adorable” and I admit that I appear to be standing alone out on this limb.

So given that this is likely just me, how about we just title this piece “An Adorable Writer Must Be Having A Slow News Day.”

Professional Example # 2

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“Actually” is the most futile, overused word on the internet. Whereas “basically” and “well” are relatively harmless tics that crowd our sentences, “actually” has an attitude.

by Claire Carusillo

Published 18 March, 2014

The cover of the Pet Shop Boys album “Actually”

For a 2000 paper titled “Actually and other markers of an apparent discrepancy between propositional attitudes of conversational partners,” linguists Sara Smith and Andreas Jucker studied the conversational use of the word actually among friends and strangers at the University of California Long Beach. The researchers wanted to better understand “discourse markers”: words or phrases that help organize our speech and writing, but which aren’t essential to a sentence’s meaning.

Examples of discourse markers include well, nonetheless, like, basically, I mean, okay. But Smith and Jucker were primarily interested in actually, and in ten hours of recorded conversations among students they counted 78 uses of the word as a discourse marker. Smith, a professor of linguistics at UCLB, said she and her colleague presumed actually would be used to disprove facts, but instead the speakers most often used the word to discount attitudes or opinions.

Whereas basically and well are relatively harmless tics that crowd our sentences, actually has an attitude. Consider this recent headline from Business Insider: “Women in Tech Actually Don’t Get Paid Less Than Men.” Or Maureen Dowd’s defense of Barack Obama after Sarah Palin accused him of “wearing mom jeans”: “Actually, the jeans the president wore in the Oval Office, talking to Putin on the phone last weekend, looked good.”

Especially on the internet, a platform where everyone is trying to stake an intellectual claim in comments sections or on Twitter, actually often expresses a very specific attitude: condescension. Salon contributor Roxane Gay, a writing professor at Eastern Illinois University, told me in an email, “When people use the word actually in many contexts, they are implying that they have exclusive access to a font of incontrovertible knowledge. When they actually you, they are offering you a gift.” 

To find an example, Gay needs look no further than the comments on her own articles. In a recent piece about the sexual abuse allegations against Woody Allen, commenter Rrhain wrote, “Mia actually encouraged the two to spend time together when Soon-Yi was an adult. What other facts are you unaware of?” Asked who is fond of actuallying her, Gay said that it’s “mostly men who are deeply passionate about ‘truth’ and ‘fairness’ and justice’.”

Uttering (or typing) actually at another person in pursuit of truth, fairness, and justice is a relatively new phenomenon. Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts the historical use of words and phrases in books, shows that printed use of actually has climbed steadily over the last two centuries. There’s a caveat: this includes all uses of the word, not just in the grammatical instances being discussed here. But consider that its more pointed counterpart, well actually – which is most often used in such instances – has seen an extreme rise since the 1980s.

Examples of discourse markers include well, nonetheless, like, basically, I mean, okay. But Smith and Jucker were primarily interested in actually, and in ten hours of recorded conversations among students they counted 78 uses of the word as a discourse marker. Smith, a professor of linguistics at UCLB, said she and her colleague presumed actually would be used to disprove facts, but instead the speakers most often used the word to discount attitudes or opinions.

Studies show that younger people are far more likely to use actually. From 2003-2004, linguist Cathleen Waters weighed data from a 1.7 million-word corpus of spoken English from Toronto, Canada, and found a steady increase in the word as age decreases. With the information collected from sociolinguistic interviews with 115 speakers, Waters published a 2008 paper called “Actually, it’s more than pragmatics, it’s really grammaticalisation.” She found that the median rate of the use of actually among speakers ages 70-92 was 0.4 times per 1,000 words. In contrast, it was more than 1.5 times per 1,000 words for those between 18-39.

According to Waters, speakers between the ages of 18-30 use actually at an even higher rate than the 18-39 age group: an average rate of 2.24 occurrences per 1,000 words. Waters believes this is because actually has replaced older phrases like indeed and in fact through a gradual linguistic process called grammaticalisation, wherein once-novel words become part of a speaker’s register. The Ngram Viewer backs up that argument:

Actually’s popularity seems only to have increased since 2008, when Waters’ essay was published. It’s become especially popular in partisan battles over issues ranging from Obamacare to gun control. “I think the term actually is thought to be [used by] a group that trolls Twitter as fact-checkers, but in fact that’s not always the way it’s used,” said Kira Hall, professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at University of Colorado Boulder. “And if it is, fact-checking is happening from conservative to liberal stances as well as from liberal to conservative stances.” Consider this Slate headline from earlier this year: “Actually, Electric Cars Are good for the planet.” Or this one from The Weekly Standard: “Actually, Hamas Killed the Palestinian Baby.” Or this one from The New Republic: “Actually, You Can’t Just ‘Restore’ Cancelled Health Plans.”

The use of actually has become so common, in fact, that it has become the source of humor and satire. Usage varies, but tweets bearing the hashtag #actually often aren’t factual challenges but rather jokes about the petty overuse of the word itself. The #WellActually hashtag, meanwhile, serves a different purpose: to mock or criticise Twitter users who are fond of using “Well, actually…” in picking fights.

Well, Kate Losse, here’s your thinkpiece – and it’s as good a sign as any that it’s time to retire actually. The word has become so ubiquitous, and so abused, that its use barely registers a sting anymore. Before long, like literally before it, actually may lose its meaning altogether. Jessica Luther, a writer and prolific Twitter user whose position on reproductive rights has drawn quite a few actuallys, summed it perfectly for me: “It’s one of those words you see and you know you’re not going anywhere productive afterwards.”