Let’s Make These Words Extinct

I enjoy language for language’s sake. English may be awash with redundant words, but it does make communicating more fun. There is a certain artistry in selecting just the right word. It feels good to find a word that is perfectly nuanced for the situation, and enjoyable novelty can come from using a word in a context where it’s seldom seen.

And yet, I sure do feel sorry for anyone learning English.

If communication is about relaying intentions, needs, and ideas, then clarity and speed are important qualities of any language. But many words in English almost seem deliberately designed to confuse.

I’d like to see the English language get a good spring clean and be rid of unclear words, phrases, and spelling. But that won’t be happening any time soon (or ever), as there are more forces driving fragmentation than consolidation in global English. Nonetheless, I’ll be doing my little part by avoiding the following blatant offenders.

Fulsome

“These heroes deserve our fulsome praise”. While the speaker here might feel full of praise, they’ve chosen their words poorly.

‘Fulsome’ can be defined in multiple ways, including as a synonym for ‘abundant’, but its primary definition is ‘to an excessive degree.’ If you give fulsome compliments, or are fulsome in your apologies, it can mean you’re being over-the-top and potentially insincere. To avoid misunderstanding, best to choose another word. It’d be a shame if your compliment was misinterpreted as a thinly-veiled insult. And vice versa.

Spendthrift

If being thrifty means to be efficient or careful in preventing waste, then surely a spendthrift would be a good person with your credit card. Spendthrift = thrifty with spending, right?

Actually no, a spendthrift is the complete opposite: ‘someone who spends extravagantly or with reckless waste’. This misleading word is an example of an auto-antonym, a word with multiple meanings, some of which are opposite to each other. Yes, in English there are so many of these fundamentally vague words that they have their own category.

Forewarn

Defined as ‘to warn in advance’, which makes sense given the ‘fore’ section of the word. But aren’t warnings, by default, always given in advance? Consider the following definitions of ‘warn’:

• Mirriam-Webster: to give notice to beforehand especially of danger or evil
• Cambridge Dictionary: to make someone realize a possible danger or problem, especially one in the future
• Oxford Dictionary: Inform someone in advance of a possible danger, problem, or other unpleasant situation.

All these definitions show that ‘warn’ already includes the element of time, thereby rendering ‘forewarn’ redundant.

‘Warn’ vs ‘Forewarn’ is a topic of dispute amongst online word aficionados (oh yeah you better believe they exist). Make of it what you will, but I struggle to think of an instance where ‘forewarn’ couldn’t be replaced with plain old ‘warn’. Outside of some quite specific situations in fiction, I suspect that ‘forewarn’ is used mostly to imbue writing with false pomp and importance.

Sanction

If you’re a certain combination of age/gender/nerdiness, you will remember when consoles like Nintendo or Sega didn’t save games. If you wanted to finish a game, you played it right to the final level in one sitting, and if you died or the console was switched off, you started again right from the beginning.

Imagine then the following scene. Young me is piloting an advanced attack helicopter, killing baddies and saving civilians in the then-futuristic year of 2001. The game is Urban Strike and I’m further in than I’ve ever managed before. I’m down to my last life.

These are exciting but stressful moments. The briefing for the next mission comes on screen, and it tells me that ‘the use of force is sanctioned’.

Now, I know that word from the Gulf War (Part One), which had ample TV news coverage only a couple years earlier. And I’m fairly sure it means some kind of restriction. Yet in this context it sounds like they’re telling me to shoot. But then again I’ve been shooting in every level, so why go out of the way to say that? I’m on my last life and can’t afford to make a mistake. What do I do?

Had I consulted a dictionary, I would’ve learned that ‘sanction’ is another auto-antonym. ‘Sanction’ can mean either to permit, such as ‘Cabinet will sanction the extra spending’, or to restrict, e.g. ‘economic sanctions against the Iraqi regime’.

What a joke. It’s not like there’s a shortage of words in English, and hey we can make new ones too. When it’s not clear if a word means something, or its polar opposite, then it’s time for that word to go the way of Saddam.

If phasing out these ambiguous auto-antonyms saves even a single child from unfairly failing in a Sega Mega Drive game, then I say it’s worth it.

Inflammable

You almost certainly heard this one before: inflammable = flammable. Many words in English start with ‘in’ to mean ‘not…’. Like how ineligible means not eligible, insincere equals not sincere, and inadequate is the same as not adequate. But in this case, that inflammable material you’re hypothetically handling is actually easily ignited and quick burning. Surprise!

Sure, there are plenty of other words where ‘in’ doesn’t mean ‘not’, e.g. intuition, inebriated, but for the sake of fire safety this particular word really should be avoided.

Just don’t say you’re sanctioning use of the word.

Restive

While a ‘restive’ location might sound like a relaxing place to head on holiday, be warned that the word commonly appears in front of names like Kabul, Mogadishu, or Baghdad.

‘Restive’ has meanings such as ‘unwilling to remain still, silent or submissive’ and is commonly used to describe regions of civil uprisings. But it wasn’t always this way. ‘Restive’ is an example of a word that has undergone considerable semantic change. Over time, the meaning of words can shift, sometimes to the point where they become the opposite of what they once meant. This is the case with ‘restive’, whose meaning can be traced across the centuries to earlier, more restful meanings such as ‘motionless’.

Biannual

The prefix ‘bi’ means ‘two’. A unicycle has one wheel, a bicycle two, and a tricycle three. By that logic, if annual means yearly then biannual would mean every two years, e.g. a biannual event happens every second year.

But no, that’s not correct. The word for every second year is ‘biennial’. ‘Biannual’ actually means twice per year.

In my experience, many people (myself included) struggle to remember what biannual/bimonthly/biweekly etc means. Enough people so as to render it ineffective for clear communication. Will my next box of bimonthly curated artisanal snacks arrive in two weeks, or two months? That’s a fourfold difference in snackage.

We can remove any guesswork by avoiding ‘biannual’ and its relatives, replacing it with terms that use the format ‘x-yearly’, for example ‘my snackbox comes twice-monthly’.

This then reserves the prefixes like ‘bi’ and ‘tri’ for periods of multiple years, following the same logic as the uni/bi/tricycle. For example, a biennial plant lives for two years, your triennial sacrifice on the winter solstice happens every three years, a bicentennial marks two hundred years since a particular event, and so on.

So, join with me and purge these garbage words – biannual, restive, inflammable, sanction, spendthrift, and fulsome – from our collective vocabulary. Every time you choose a different, more accurate word, you strike a blow in the cause of clear communication. Together, we can make English betterer.

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Got another word you think we should phase out? Leave a comment about it below.

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