That's Lazy Talk!

I have a tendency towards pedantry. It seems to me that many neologisms or novel uses of existing words are indicative of laziness (it's one thing not to know a suitable word or usage already exists, but another not to bother finding out). I do it too, sometimes wittingly, sometimes not. Just yesterday I realized, while using it, that the verb "to result" is one I would have despised all along had I seen its emergence. It's on my list now.

Also yesterday two phrases came to annoy me enough to merit listing: "to go too far" and "to cross a line". I don't think these indicate the kind of ignorance-laziness I just described, though; I think they indicate a worse laziness, a laziness of thought. They express no more than a vague dissatisfaction that, because it is vague, does not get critically examined. Being slightly more specific than just opining "it is wrong" by suggesting that the problem is one of extent rather than essence, the phrases imply that critical thought actually has been given when in fact it has not: what the phrases mean is "I don't like the application of whatever to this case but I can't tell you why."

What constitutes one's line, and how does it relate to another's? Nobody asks. If we even know what our particular line is (and I doubt we do or we would have said so), we assume it is self-evident. Assumptions about the reason for or extent of dissatisfaction allows a shared experience of dissatisfaction to emerge even when there might be fundamental differences about the reasons for it. The phrases thus make it easy to conflate disparate opinions without realizing it (especially by the news media, bastions of precision and accuracy that they are), with a consequently unwarranted effect on public discourse. Take Wisconsin's union-busting state government: politicians were elected in part on a plank of unions having gone too far, without offering any specifics, and the electorate learned too late that the politicians were more reactionary than itself.

The phrases make me cringe now. I'm going to start asking for clarification when I hear them, and whoever cannot explain themselves more clearly will lose, to my mind, their right to the opinion.