Do You Know What I Mean?

Languages change.  If you need any evidence, sit down and read Shakespeare.  When was the last time you burst out with a good "Zounds" or "Alackaday"?  

Then there's all the cliche phrases, like "fight fire with fire," "too much of a good thing," and "wear your heart on your sleeve." 

The thing is, they weren't cliches when Shakespeare wrote them.  They were fresh baked, still warm from the oven. Billy the Bard may be the first one who ever said them. 

Languages change, and meanings change with them.  But as the way we write and speak evolves, do we ever lose shades of meaning?  Do some things become harder to say, perhaps harder to think?  What's your opinion, gentle reader?

Excited about prepositions

For most of my fifty-six years, when people were looking forward to an event or when they wanted to express enthusiasm about something that was already happening, they'd say "I'm excited about" the event."  When they wanted to share someone's joy, they'd say to that person, "I'm excited for you."  For example:

I'm excited for my son, who has been accepted at a very good college. He is excited about their theatre and computer departments.

In the past five years, I have seen more and more instances of "excited for" being used for events.  It seems to have spread geographically (from the midwestern U.S. to the coasts) and generationally (from Generation X and Millennials up to Boomers like me). 

It sounds strange to me, but it doesn't upset me.  I know what the other person is saying in all but the most rare of cases.  The words are doing their work.

You might say that the distinction is important because being excited for another person is a laudable emotion: it helps make friendships and social relationships stronger.  Being excited about an event is a personal taste, and reducing everything to personal tastes would be a great loss to us as individuals and as a society. 

But I don't really think that people are losing empathy for one another because they say "for" when I would say "about."  If social bonds are fraying, language is not the cutting edge of the problem.

  
Taking an interest in language

Here's an example that worries me more.  "Uninterested" is fading from the language, in favor of "disinterested."  They used to mean two different things, and the difference is still important and useful.

As Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl, explains:

An uninterested person is bored, unconcerned, or indifferent: a disinterested person is impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome.  If you're on trial, you want a disinterested judge.

In our contentious, litigious culture, being able to say "disinterested" and know that people will understand you seems like a major benefit.  You might say that we have other perfectly good ways to say "disinterested": for instance, "impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome"!  Yet it still seems useful to me to have one word that pulls all these strands of meaning together. 

Otherwise, people will think you mean "he can't be bothered" when what you really mean is "he can't be bribed."

Plus, language may change but texts remain as written.  I can see the day coming when "disinterested observer" may cause as much confusion and sniggering as "gay apparel" does now, because the meanings of the words have changed.

Where do you draw your line in the sand? What makes a traditional usage worth fighting to keep, and when should we "be like the times" (as Shakespeare's Richard III would say)?

An uninterested person is bored, unconcerned, or indifferent; a disinterested person is impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome. If you're on trial, you want a disinterested judge. - See more at: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/disinterested-versus-uninterested#sthash.U3zipOCI.dpuf

An uninterested person is bored, unconcerned, or indifferent; a disinterested person is impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome. If you're on trial, you want a disinterested judge. - See more at: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/disinterested-versus-uninterested#sthash.U3zipOCI.dpuf

An uninterested person is bored, unconcerned, or indifferent; a disinterested person is impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome. If you're on trial, you want a disinterested judge. - See more at: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/disinterested-versus-uninterested#sthash.U3zipOCI.dpuf

An uninterested person is bored, unconcerned, or indifferent; a disinterested person is impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome. If you're on trial, you want a disinterested judge. - See more at: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/disinterested-versus-uninterested#sthash.U3zipOCI.dpuf

Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis (ed. Harris & Gorenflo)

 
This is really three books in one.  "Share or Die" is the theme of several essays in the book, and you will find inspirational stories about how people pool resources, from housing to knowledge, in order to live better than they would otherwise.  You'll also find how-to tips about educating yourself, choosing a roommate wisely, and starting worker co-ops and housing co-ops.  Implicit in these essays is a critique of consumption as a lifestyle and of capitalism as a system that demands consumption to survive.

Another set of essays focus more on the "Get Lost Generation," the Millennials or Generation Y, who came of age expecting that a college education would allow them to do it all, have it all, and change whatever discomforted them in the world they inherited.  Society fostered some of these expectations.  Others seem to have been mass delusions.  In any case, the Great Recession dashed a lot of hopes and made young people re-examine the value of a college education, a job, owning a home, marrying (since none of them have turned out as expected, at least since the Great Recession). 

If you are white and from a middle-class background and a member of this generation, you will probably find yourself or people you know portrayed in this book.  For a late Baby Boomer like me, it offers a chance to listen in to conversations and soliloquies I might not otherwise hear.  I do think a limitation of the book is that it doesn't solicit the voices of Black, Latino, and/or immigrant youth.  I have worked with people from those cohorts, and I think they would have a whole different set of concerns (and express shared concerns in a very different way).

The least developed set of essays in the book deal with the "age of crisis" we live in.  When I was in my twenties and attending graduate school, I provided personal care to an old leftist who had suffered a stroke.  One day, I told him that the undergraduates I taught didn't know about Vietnam or Watergate. "They have no sense of history!" I exclaimed.  "Neither do you," he retorted, and reeled off a series of important events from the first half of the twentieth century that I had barely heard of.

So, I am not in any position to blame the writers of this book for exaggerating the unique quality of the age they live in--but that is what they do.  There is no sense that protest began before Occupy Wall Street.  There are no references to the long history of cooperatives in this country, let alone Mondragon, in Spain.  And few of these writers consider that some of the wonderful experiments in collective living, collaborative consumption, and political activism they are engaged in might not survive when they need enough income to raise a child, or health insurance for themselves, or money and leisure to afford to take care of an aging parent.  (The essay "Get on the Lattice" by Ahlander and Kofman is a notable exception.)

We should all read this book--and share it with others.  Then, we should invite friends and strangers to a potluck dinner and discuss what it means to each of us.  That way, we can take up the challenge this book poses and carry it further.