An editor frets about matters that might escape the notice of someone not professionally engaged with words.
This editor, for example, has thought long and carefully about the obvious overindulgence by modern communicators in neologisms and concluded that something must be done.
Neologisms, of course, are new words or new meanings assigned to existing words. And they are not—let it be stipulated now—categorically bad.
The language needs its neologisms. New things emerge, and they require new words and phrases. Think of "e-mail" (or "email," if you prefer) or "laptop." At some point in history, "automobile" was a neologism.
At their best, neologisms sparkle with creativity. Who, for example, was the genius who enriched the English language with "skyscraper"?
Furthermore, neologisms do no harm when they bump aside established words with their heft of novelty, as long as they communicate as well as the displaced old-timers. Neologisms such as these may be unnecessary, but they do keep language interesting.
The infraction
Truly offensive neologisms barge into usage at the expense of forebears clearly superior to the upstarts in precision and clarity. Neologisms such as these don't enliven communication; they muddle it. This represents an infraction to which editors are duty-bound to respond.
Examples in this analysis are old words jammed into new definitions with a net loss of precision.
The first is the word "player" when used to describe a company, investor, or worker.
Players are people who participate in games or perform in theaters. Use of the noun to describe people or entities for which better words exist trivializes everyone and everything involved. Companies don't play. Investors don't play. Workers don't play. They work. To call them players is contradictory.
The nouns "company," "investor," and "worker" carry distinct meaning. They are precise. "Player" in its perverse usage means someone or some entity somehow involved in something. It is insufferably mushy.
And where, in faddish argot, do these players play—that is, work? In "space," that's where.
Who, by now, has not had to endure phrases such as "players in the oil and gas space"? This editor cringes every time he hears it.
Why not use "industry," a perfectly suitable word, instead of "space"? Why not "business"? Why "space," for crying out loud?
"Space" is empty. "Space" is, well, space. "Space" in the sense of "outer space" implies an absence of defining limits. Where limits are defined, as in "tank space," the word connotes emptiness. Using "space" in place of "industry" or "business" drains the message of context and content.
Linguistic shifts from phrases such as "companies in the oil and gas business" to frivolities like "players in the oil and gas space" are to communication what the displacement of silver by aluminum would be to the manufacture of jewelry. They weaken and cheapen.
Writers and speakers who use injudicious neologisms such as these betray an unhealthy preference for fashion over clarity and generate doubt about their seriousness of purpose.
Reverse offense
Another unwholesome substitute for "industry" commits the reverse offense by implying more precision than is possible. The neologism is "sector," the use of which doesn't seem as light-minded as that of "space" but might, in fact, be more insidious.
Economists and politicians seem especially given to the use of "sector" in place of "industry." Can this be because the word, which connotes a measured part of some well-defined whole, makes industries seem more neatly comprehensible than they really are and therefore more amenable to control? If that's the case, the mere use of the word represents a step beyond confusion toward the manifold hazards of intrusive governance.
A fussy editor thus has exposed a sinister threat, camouflaged in language, to free society. And most readers probably thought he was just nit-picking for the fun of it.