Word Burglars

Much of my work involves trying to inspire people through words. Part of the difficulty of that task is it's not always easy to know if the language you are speaking holds the same meaning in the mind of the hearer, both in the basic meaning and in the subtle nuances. You may think you know what the word simple means, but do I mean easy or unintelligent? Do I mean that distilled simplicity that can only be the result of long experience or the naive simplicity of youth?

It's often good to adjust your language to fit your audience, but you also need to retain your authentic voice, because nothing sounds worse than a forced attempt to mimic the language of your audience. Perhaps the greatest struggle is when the morphing and transforming of language over time makes it impossible to pin down meanings and some ideas become almost impossible to express. Anyone involved in Biblical translation will be familiar with those moments of elusive meaning. But it happens today and it's happening increasingly within the many variations of the language we call English. I have much affection for America and have many good American friends, but the Americanisation of the English language sometimes causes me some frustration.

However, few things in the Americanisation of the English language bug me more than the invention of the word 'burglarize'. A burglar is someone who burgles. The noun burglar is a role derived from the verb 'to burgle', in the same way that beggar is derived from the verb 'to beg'. Of course these days, there are many more examples of this where the ending is 'er' rather than 'ar'; a runner runs, a singer sings and a fighter fights, but the principle is the same. You can't then turn the role back into the verb by adding yet another suffix. A runner cannot runnerize, a preacher cannot preacherize and a beggar cannot beggarize.

The ize ending on burglarize is particularly problematic as it seems to be treating burglar as if it were an adjective like secular, familiar, regular, popular or vulgar. A regular is not someone who regs, to popule is not a thing and secular folk do not go around seculing all over the place.

Some Americanisms are simply nouns being used for different objects in a different world. Language always moves on and the meaning of words will always change, but burglarize signals a potential failureization of language. A demeanification of words and a chaosing of the landscape for the worderizers of our generation. There are many funs you can have with language (depending on how many languas constitute the full measure of your language) but if you're going to mess around with the grammatical construct of the English language then you really need to understand the elements with which you are messing. No one has ever burglarized a house because that would mean turning the house into a burglar.

OK, so I should say that most of my rants about small details come from a place of humour and affection, both for the subject and the people on both sides of the argument. This occasion is no exception, but it holds within it a serious point. We live in a world that is increasingly bound by not one, but many languages of division. Though the truth of the arguments are important, people are rarely that different on one side of an argument from another. Yet it is increasingly difficult to communicate across the divides, because the nuances of language remain untranslated. More than that, the subtleties of the language we hear day in, day out, can begin to reshape the people we are through the ideas that our language equips us to express.

When an American says 'our house has been burglarized', they probably mean something that belongs to them has been taken from them and the safety of their home has been violated. What I hear is that they have been made into burglars; thieves of culture and language, by the very culture and language they have inherited. I am reminded of the irony of people who rightly feel violated by someone invading their house, yet it's a house built on land taken forcibly from the indigenous people who once lived there. I am reminded of how the language carried with their ancestors to this new land can on the one hand be so poorly treated as to invent nonsensical words through misunderstanding, yet on the other hand can often be used as a test and a cultural stick to beat others who would choose to come and live there.

It is easy to pick on the visible inconsistencies of American culture, but every culture is made into thieves by its history; we are all 'burglarized' by our cultural past, we all speak nonsense that feels like it makes sense to us and misappropriate bits of culture we don't understand. But true meaning only comes when we stop and ask ourselves what we really mean by what we say - and where do the words of those who seem to be our enemies, actually mean the same as our own words?