WORDS bother me. Like children they begin their lives with such simplicity and candour. Then corruption sets in. Fashion corrupts meaning in its determination to shock. Black becomes white, wicked is the new good and brown the new black. Or so it used to be. I hear that brown is now the old new black which tells me absolutely nothing - but then those who corrupt language often want us to understand absolutely nothing.
Oxford students talk about their “battels” and “collections” (instead of their bills and exams) in order to exclude the non-initiated, while politicians speak of “collateral damage” and “friendly fire” to obscure the fact that the US is blowing up aid workers and friendly politicians. But, the word that is really getting to me originates not in Pentagon-speak but from New York.
“Whatever” began life as a medieval adjective and pronoun and spent 700 years doing useful service until it acquired its current dubious new meaning. Stick it at the end of a statement like “politicians speak of collateral damage to obscure the facts, whatever” and what you are saying is “I’m not sure if this is the case but, hell, I don’t really care”. When someone has annoyingly corrected your inaccuracy with “actually, it’s military spokesmen who use the phrase”, use “whatever” as a retort and it means “cool it, pedant, I don’t care what the right answer is”.
Some might say this is forgivable urban patois. As long as “whatever” does not appear as a category on multiple choice papers, does it really matter?
I think it does. We need precision to avoid ambiguity, muddled thinking and ignorance. Just as, in war we need precision bombing to avoid the needless murder of innocents. Language should make us more intelligent and caring and I hope that any US pilot who gets rebuked for almost blowing up the country’s future prime minister and turns to his superiors with a “whatever” on his lips, gets severely smacked around the head, buttocks - or whatever.
