Difficult words

I HAVE written for a living for more than half a century, and - like any craftsman - there are tools I like, and others I get on less well with.

For instance, there are few words that I dislike more than eatery. If I were a restaurateur, a chef or a restaurant manager, I would hate it.

The reason is not, as you might think, that it is a recent invention: no, eatery has been with us for more than a century. The reason it makes me wince is that it puts the emphasis on the act of eating, of putting food into one’s mouth, chewing and swallowing, of refuelling - which is usually the last thing on my mind when I dine out.

Restaurateurs spend fortunes on getting the ambiance of a restaurant right. Chefs spend lifetimes working with flavours and learning how to present dishes beautifully. Those who appreciate their food know that the food they savour is enhanced by both atmosphere and service: fine dining is, to my mind, an art form. Eatery reduces the experience to that of a bodily function, and the restaurant table to that of a trough. If you think about it, it is offensive - like describing a masterpiece as a few splashes of paint. It makes one wonder how those who use the word eatery would describe a toilet.

I haven’t been able to use the word prestigious without at least mild anxiety since I watched a trainee reporter in a newsroom being ridiculed by the top team for using it. The news editor asked what it meant (which is more wicked than it sounds). The deputy news editor - who thought himself learned - asked if it came from the same root as prestidigitation (conjuring, to you and me). The chief reporter just said ‘ooooo’, miming a handbag pulled up to his chin Monty Python style. They were simpler, and crueller, times.

These days, the adjective prestigious is more common and regularly applied to property, which is odd since it originally meant status or respect resulting from high achievement. It’s difficult to think of bricks and mortar achieving anything beyond longevity. I accept, however, that the secondary meaning of ‘the power to impress’ might be appropriate to the odd palace, castle or country house, although I would probably use the word ‘impressive’. I like to keep things simple.

I’m on even thinner ground, I admit, when it comes to my mild irritation with the word vibrant. It originally meant ‘agitated’, and comes from the Latin vibrantem meaning ‘swaying’ as in ‘moving to and fro’. Today’s meaning is closer to ‘vigorous’ or full of life. It’s a word beloved of property developers and town planners who like to talk of the vibrant communities they’re creating.

Unfortunately, I have a very literal mind and whenever I see it used in this context I get an instant and disturbing image of people literally vibrating as they make their way around parks and thoroughfares. I would usually use lively as a synonym of personal preference.

The words flounder and founder make me cringe when they’re used as if they were interchangeable. To flounder means ‘to struggle to move or stay upright’; to founder means to break down, or to fail altogether. They represent different stages of decay: a government policy might be said to flounder if it isn’t going anywhere, but a business that goes bust founders, like a ship hitting a reef: it’s over. An additional annoyance, if one were needed, is that a flounder is also a flatfish, and I suspect many think of it as a metaphor for something flapping along the bottom. (It isn’t a metaphor.)

Finally, for now, at least, I’d like to express my antipathy for all of those words that overstate the case. Principal among these is awesome. The meaning of awe is rooted in fear and anguish. Biblically it meant ‘dread mixed with veneration’. And if those socks your partner bought you for Christmas really were awesome you would both fear and worship them, which isn’t a useful quality in socks. Curiously, the word has only been a synonym for excellent since about 1980, which is  a few years after I started my writing career - so perhaps you can understand my distress.

The tendency to extravagant exaggeration - hyperbole - is almost built into the foundations of advertising and marketing. Essential, for example, originally meant indispensable, something you really couldn’t do without, like water - but the word has morphed into a synonym for basic or fundamental. You can now buy an essential hoodie, for instance. Who knew? And adored has turned up recently in my inbox as a synonym for liked - but without the rapture and worship that adoration implies.

There are words and phrases that I like, of course, and that might be the subject of a separate piece. For the moment, I’m glad to have got this little lot off my chest.