As a dyslexic who’s also improbably a novelist and therefore always puzzling over, growing dissatisfied with, distrusting, parsing, misspelling, and frequently mincing words, I’m amused by words that shift round, reversing their field on one meaning in order to denote an opposite meaning. Cleave is the first example we all immediately think of. Sanction, left, resign are notable others we might’ve overlooked. Contronyms, these are called in dusty dictionary back rooms. Contronym is the word for words that mean one thing but also mean the opposite of that one thing. Belt. Dike. Flag. Contronym, itself, contrary to what we might hope, is not a contronym. Though it’d be a kind of justice if it were.
Charm has brought all this possible irrelevance to mind. Charm conventionally means something like “the power to give delight”; or, “arousing of admiration.” “The admiral strode into the hall and totally charmed all the junior officers’ wives.”
Ignore, if you will, the other definitions of charm that denote a trinket a high-school girl would once have worn on her wrist in the days before ubiquitous tattoos, and the antique notion of charm as designating “a confused sound of voices.” (I never heard of that one; it was just there in my big Random House.) In any case these uses are straight-forward sound-alikes/spelled-alikes—homonyms—not words at war with themselves.
Charm lands in my sights because, while usually denoting delight (it does have such a lotion-y sound and pleasing appearance), it has now unlikably shifted via modern usage to signify almost the opposite of delight, thus sort of betraying itself. And me. I’m one of those readers who feels sore over the loss or demotion of a word. Gay….ugh; share….jeez; disinterest….unforgivable. Though I’m not, I hope, one of these tiresome pseudo-purists who’s always sniping and pecking at people for using farther when they mean further. I’m more a conservationist. A bricklayer who prefers the sturdier, old-fashioned bricks. I’m against words becoming slurred when the result is a net loss of vital intelligence.
Recently I was writing a sports profile of the stalwart NFL gunslinger Peyton Manning. This was for a big sports magazine you’ve all probably heard of but almost certainly never read. In my profile I stated that one of Manning’s great, manly strengths was that in all phases of the game he was “plausible.” As a team leader, as player, as an off-the-field goombah. Don’t ask me why this adjective came to mind. Word choices just happen to me that way.
But upon reading “plausible,” my editor responded that possibly I didn’t want to use that word because to him “plausible” meant not what I understood it to mean—which was credible, reasonable, persuasive—but that actually it meant unreliable, deceptive, and shifty. Was I surprised? Yes.
I immediately looked it up, of course. I still do that. And there were all my definitions lined up like loyal soldiers. Cogent. Tenable. Sound. Plus a bunch of others tending toward the same general notion—probity. But there like a warty gremlin, peeking up from the bottom of my Google “dictionary,” was also “Skilled at producing persuasive arguments, especially ones intended to deceive. A plausible liar.”
No way, I thought. I’m not going to lose plausible. I won’t go into how this disagreement with my editor sorted out. Both well and not well, as it happened. No one need wonder, of course, about the origins of this dismaying “new meaning” for doughty, previously admired Mr. Plausible. Ben Jonson famously put it most memorably when he noted, “Wheresoever manners and fashion are corrupt, language is. It imitates the public riot.”
Plausible has been corrupted and turned against itself—by deceptive politicians, boobish newscasters, and clownish reality show hosts who’ve implausibly become public figures—none of whom give much of a rat’s ass about what words mean or ever meant, or about the consequence of reckless usage upon the public weal. Words leave their yaps unmediated by intention, by intelligence, by any clue at all. For them, words are there to feed the elephant. The notion that when we lose a word we also begin to lose a thought doesn’t compute to these monkeys. Riot is hardly the word for it.
Charm—to my hearing—has suffered a similar spider-webby fracturing of its hold on delight and on the nice capacity to incite admiration. Query yourself—if you still do that kind of thing—about what comes to mind when you think, “He charmed me.” Or, “She graduated from charm school.” Or, “The President is waging a charm campaign on the evangelical right….” Or just think of the piquant (and faulty French) “Trés charmant!”
Am I right, or am I right? Deceptive. Superficial. Cozening.
Kinda creepy.
I certainly don’t want to be right about this. I want charm to go on being charming, and not be snapping at its own tail, turning a sweet smile into a sneer. Wallace Stevens wrote that “We gulp down evil, choke at good.” By which he meant that expressing good is a harder chore than expressing ill. But the ability to express good is even more valuable to us than expressing ill. If we can’t express good in a plausible, nuanced way, we could begin to lose track of good altogether. Then where will we be? We need all the good words we can salvage from the public riot teeming around us now. Wittgenstein, himself, was right that the words we use (or don’t use) are the world we live in. These days, that world just seems scarier than it used to.
Richard Ford lives in East Boothbay, Maine, and in New Orleans. His most recent book is Between Them: Remembering My Parents.
