Apropos of nothing—no social or educational import whatever—I have to say I hate the word “impactful.” Even when it sits silently on paper, it hurts my ears. Impactful. Ugh.
This isn’t a case of word snobbery. I’m not a card carrying member of the word police. I agree with the statement I first read as a high school senior that the dictionary is a historian (an historian?), not a lawgiver. New words are great. Inspired slang is wonderful. “Ain’t” is a word, and a good word at that. “I ain’t got no pencil” doesn’t mean I have a pencil (Language is communication, not math. Two negatives don’t automatically make a positive. Everyone knows the speaker doesn’t have a pencil—everyone, that is, except that persnickety English teacher who pretends not to understand). It’s cute to answer a student’s question, “Can I go to the bathroom?” by saying, “Yes you can, but you may not.” It may be one of those teachable moments, though if the poor kid pees his/her pants, the only lesson will be that the teacher is a sadist. But in real life, everyone knows the sentence, “Can I go to the bathroom?” is a request to leave the room to relieve oneself.
This morning I read a short note in the Star about the death of actress Madeleine LeBeau at 92. I learned she had a “small but impactful role in ‘Casablanca.'” Ironically, that ugly word, virtually devoid of emotion, is supposed to describe the visual and emotional impact (ah, much better!) of a closeup on LeBeau’s face as she stands, tears in her eyes, during the spontaneous singing of “La Marseillaise” by the patrons in Rick’s (Humphrey Bogart’s) cafe to drown out some German soldiers.
Impactful. Who made that a word? To find out, I googled it. (“To google,” by the way, is an example of “verbing,” where nouns are turned into verbs. The trend surged in business circles a few decades back [“We need to dialogue about this”; “Let’s calendar our next meeting”] and has become a vital part of our online world [“Bookmark that website”; “Email me”; “Text Me”; “I’m gonna blog about that”]). “Impactful” has been around at least since the 1950s, most probably created by academic writers, who love to invent clunky jargon to distinguish themselves from normal English speakers. Later it was picked up by business people who use newly coined words to make themselves feel like they’re ahead of the curve, as if a new term is the same thing as a clever new idea. Gradually, it worked its way into art, dance and film criticism which, I guess, is why it was in the LeBeau obituary and turns up so often in movie reviews.
If blogging on this topic plays an impactful role in limiting the use of that awful word, my work here is done.
This article appears in May 12-18, 2016.
It’s a godawful word. It did take off in the late ’50s; here’s hoping it slips into oblivion again: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?cont…
That was an Associated Press brief that set you off. While AP style is an important base for solid written journalism, it’s also been the source of much clumsy mangling of the language.
Totally agreed. It’s a word that signifies virtually nothing, and in fact often masks true meaning, as is the case with so many neologisms in our soulless techno world. Far better to make a word choice that actually describes or qualifies (or even quantifies, at the very least) an impact; e.g., with the performer mentioned above, her performance was “small but powerful/moving/memorable/poignant/et al.”
By using meaningless, dumb-downed words like “impactful”, we’re not just communicating poorly. We’re essentially erasing those other far more evocative and elegant words from our lexicon and slowly but steadily eroding the beauty and power of our language, which is really sad.
Here’s a sentence relating to this morning’s ugly reality, in which it’s quite clear what this ugly word signifies:
“As it appears that Prop 123 will probably pass by a very narrow margin, it is plain that the sell-outs of Safier, Duval, Farley, and others in our lame excuse for a Democrat establishment were IMPACTFUL.”