With three minutes left in a game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, LeBron James hits a 3-pointer, causing the announcer to note "the score is 89-85, a4-point differential.” Cars have differentials, but do basketball scores have differentials? Why not instead use the simple word“difference?”What attracts this announcer to the word“differential?"”
The same thing,I suppose,that attracts television news reporters and newspaper journalists to the word "replicate," when copy will do nicely. The same people are also likely to reach for"recalibrate,”when what they have in mind is usually nothing more than“reconsider.”
Why are people,especially many who make their livings through the use of language,attracted by these and so many other hollow words? Those who use these imprecise word smust feel a happy sense of possessing a rich vocabulary. Lacing their own speech and writing with these new words makes them feel not only well-informed but educated.
The words also happen to be examples of what H.W.Fowler, author of “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,"called"novelty-hunting(猎奇),”or "the casting about for words of which one can feel not that they give one's meaning more intelligently or exactly than those the man in the street would have used in expressing the same thing, but that they are not the ones that would have occurred to him.”Fowler thought the use of such words a “useful outward sign of inner dullness.”His advice was to avoid such people，but，he added,“unluckily they hunt in packs."
Words have their vogues (流行性).Fowler again:"“Every now & then a word emerges from obscurity (含糊), or even from nothingness or a merely potential & not actual existence,into sudden popularity... Ready acceptance of vogue words seems to some people the sign of an alert mind; to others it stands for the herd instinct & lack of individuality."
The close observation of language, pressing words for exact meanings, has always bee nimportant, but has become even more so since the rise in significance of the news media in politics. In the corruption of language, the media, to do a bit of novelty-hunting, make for an everyday superspreader event.
Language changes and change is the first rule of language. But there's good and bad change, and to allow language to wander off into obscure realms is to sacrifice accuracy of communication and give up hope of discovering the truth about politics or indeed about human affairs generally.
1. What phenomenon does the author call attention to in the first two paragraphs?
2.Why do many people like to use hollow words?
3. What did Fowler say about those who go in for "novelty-hunting"?
4.Who favors vogue words according to Fowler?
5.What does the author call for by writing this passage?
