Easier than thinking

Our writer notes some too-prevalent clichés.

In a recent astronomy article our writer came upon a reference to “. . . the eclipse that helped confirm relativity and changed the world’s conception of the universe forever.”  (The reference is to a solar eclipse in 1919, about which we may write more in a later post.)  To be blunt, it’s bad writing.  Not because of the hype, though it certainly took a lot more than one solar eclipse to bring general acceptance of Einstein’s theories, but because of the metaphor.  We have a world with a conception of the universe.  The world is a shorthand for people, of course; a hyperbolic shorthand, because even now the fraction of people around the world who actually understand General Relativity is tiny.  But “the universe” is not people; so the parallelism of a decent metaphor is shot.  It grates.

Such for the writer’s craft.  But our writer then asks: “Is it to be expected that the conception of the universe would change for a time, and then snap back?  Why this gratuitous `forever?'”  Indeed, once we start thinking about it, the assertion that things would change forever seems amazingly arrogant.  So far it’s been a mere century since the 1919 eclipse; forever lasts much longer than that.  As Fangorn the Ent said, “‘Never’ is much too long a word for mortals to use.”  Asserting “forever,” however useful as an intensive, is simple nonsense.

But, alas, it’s not the end of the clichés this passage leads to.  A common expression nowadays (even in the BBC, heaven help us!) is that this or that event “changed history forever.”  Our writer becomes rather animated on this subject.  “Does history change for a time, and then normally revert?  Does Brutus stab Caesar only for a while, and then the story changes?  Is it only some specific things that continue to be true?  Nonsense.”  It is true that historians change their interpretation of history, and sometimes the details of the stories are changed when new evidence comes to light.  But that’s not what this phrasing is meant to say.  Instead, it actually means, “This event had important consequences.”

We speculate that “changed history forever” is a shortened version of the older “changed the course of history forever.”  The latter assumes that, at the time, history was moving in a certain direction (building or destroying empires, say) and a certain event sent it in another one.  We doubt that any professional historian would subscribe to this picture of history nowadays, either the “course of history” part or the influence of a single event, except maybe with careful caveats and in limited cases.  But at least it’s not nonsense on the face of it.

By shortening the phrase, the limited thought has turned into none at all; and a nonsensical phrase is used solely to make an event seem more important.  It’s a nod toward the narrative imperative, in that it increases drama, but at the cost of any meaning.  The language is left less fit to express ideas.

It’s easier than thinking.