The Development of Useless Words and Technologies:  How Silly Is It Really?

I’m extremely lucky to have a mother who remains quite active both mentally and physically, with whom I can have fun little conversations on subjects that few other people would possibly care a whit about, like the dictionary.com “word of the day.”  It’s common for one of us to write to the other upon checking our email when we get up in the morning, commenting on the featured word, like this one from earlier in the week: “circumvolve,” meaning to revolve or wind about.

I wrote: Personally, I’m a fan of all the common verbs we have in the English language that are simply Latin prepositions conjoined with Latin verbs–starting with two from this very sentence: preposition (put before) and conjoin (join with).  I’m also fine on the many other common words with similar derivations:  submit (send under), transfer (carry across), etc.  I don’t believe however that this confers (carries with) on us unlimited license to take every single Latin preposition and butt it up against every single Latin verb, as in circumvolve. 

Mom, wonderfully concise as she often can be:  It isn’t a word I need.  

I respond:  Exactly.  We could have circumit (send around) or transvolve (roll across), or any of hundreds of others, but would we be the better for all of that?  I believe most of these were a product of the 19th Century when overt pomposity, especially with language, was more in fashion than it is today.

If you’re willing to stretch your imagination, there is a tie-in here to our world of today, and our penchant for developing technologies (rather than words) that offer very little value to humankind. Let’s look at this from a high level.

Here we are: seven billion people on a tiny blue dot in space.  Two billion live in health and nutritional conditions that are unimaginably miserable to those of us living in the developed world. Our entire civilization, rich and poor, faces disaster of biblical proportion, at best case the end of this century, in terms of climate disruption/sea-level rise, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, and water and food shortages, just to name a few. Where are our technology dollars going?  Autonomous driving cars (that run on gasoline and diesel), the next i-Phone release, and wearable computers.  The vast majority of the philanthropic dollars focused on the aforementioned two billion poorest of the poor is focused on curing their diseases, which will enable them to live long enough to become active in sexual reproduction, rather than aiming at manufacturing less disease and suffering in the first place via education and family planning.

When one looks at the follies of human existence in this light, perhaps building useless new words from Latin roots doesn’t seem so asinine after all.