Evoking and Deducing the Unimaginable Hypotheticals of How Society Feels about the Optics of Entertaining and Gaslighting Droves of Reactionary, Relatable, Passive-Aggressive, Judgmental, Censorious, and Self-Aware Empaths and Narcissists Who Have Regret and Who Are Very Intentional

Evoking and Deducing the Unimaginable Hypotheticals of How Society Feels about the Optics of Entertaining and Gaslighting Droves of Reactionary, Relatable, Passive-Aggressive, Judgmental, Censorious, and Self-Aware Empaths and Narcissists Who Have Regret and Who Are Very Intentional

by Joseph Suglia

Evoking

“Let students find their quiet place.  Then, let them write a haiku about a beetle or a feeling their place invokes.”  If a wizard were to grant me one wish, it would be for Anglophone language-users to stop confusing the verb to evoke with to invoke.  To invoke means “to appeal to an authority, such as a religious text or an imposing thinker.”  To evoke means “to suggest.”  A place might evoke a feeling; it does not invoke a feeling.

Deducing

“He deduced that the mound had been used for a burial ritual.”  No, he induced such an inference.  He was not practicing deductive logic.  He was practicing inductive logic.  To deduce means to begin with a general statement and therefrom to seek evidence in order to support that statement.  To deduce comes from the Latin deducere, which means “to move away from.”  To induce may mean “to begin with evidence—and therefrom to come up with a general statement.”  It comes from the Latin inducere, which means “to move into.”  Thus, if someone is drawing conclusions after surveying a mound of dirt, that person is inducing, not deducing.  Inducible is a great word that is only used by nerds such as myself.  There is nothing wrong with “such as myself,” incidentally, even though Microsoft Word underlines it twice in blue.

Unimaginable

“An unimaginable humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Sudan.”  But can one not imaginarily envision such a crisis?  Can one not represent such a crisis in the imagination?  A square circle might be unimaginable, but a zebra-headed griffin is not.  Neither is a humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

Hypotheticals

“Let’s not get into the hypotheticals of what would’ve happened if Franz Ferdinand hadn’t been killed.”  Hypothetical is an adjective, not a noun.  The nominal form is hypothesis (singular) or hypotheses (plural).

How Society Feels

“We need to talk about how society feels about women’s issues.”  But society does not “feel” anything.  A society is a concentration of people.  Perhaps those people have feelings, but “society” does not.  It is emotionless.  It also cannot think or believe.  It cannot tell you anything.

Optics

“The optics are not good.”  That should read, presumably: “The optics is not good.”  Optics is a singular noun, or it may be a singular noun.  A word is not plural merely because it ends in the letter S.

Entertaining

Even if I were to live as long as Zeus, I would never understand why the children misapply the verb to entertain.  You can entertain a proposition or a proposal, but if you write that you are entertaining a person, this means that you are amusing that person.  For these reasons, one oughtn’t write, “I refuse to entertain negativity.”  Again: To entertain is either “to amuse people” or “to hold a proposition in one’s mind.”  Thus, it would make more sense to write, “I refuse to entertain negative people,” if one were a clown with an ultra-sensitive disposition and fastidious tastes.  It would also make more sense to write, “I refuse to entertain such a negative proposition,” if one means one wouldn’t want to consider such a proposition.

Gaslighting

This term has come to mean mere “lying” in American culture, since American culture dumbs down everything.  One should keep the provenance of this term in mind, however.   Gaslighting is derived from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight.  In the play, a murderous husband named Jack attempts to deceive his wife Bella into believing that the gaslights in their house aren’t dimming, even though they are.  He is trying to drive her insane.  Gaslighting does mean “lying,” in a sense, but it signifies a particular form of lying.  It means deceiving someone into believing something that is contrary to sensory evidence.

Droves

An excellent student of mine wrote this sentence in her essay: “Many are unnerved by the droves of abandoned buildings, as well as the population ravaged by poverty.”  The sentence is fine, of course, but I did take slight exception to the use of the word droves.  A drove is something that is drifting.  Drove is derived from the Middle English word drīfan, which means “to drive.”  A drove is a cluster, a clutch, a concentration, a constellation of things or people, but they must be in motion.

Reactionary

“It is the nature of conservatives that we are somewhat reactionary.”  To be reactionary is not to react to something or to someone.  It means to be an unreconstructed, retrogressive conservative, a paleo-conservative.  For this reason, the sentence cited above is tautologous.  The word for “reacting to something or someone” is reactive, not reactionary.

Relatable

I once made the mistake of correcting a radio-interviewer who misused this word, and he retaliated against me by ending the interview.  If you use the word relatable, it should be clear what is relating to what or who is relating to whom.  Relatable to what?  Relatable to whom?  Don’t just write that someone or something is relatable, please!

Passive-Aggressive

This term has been so often misapplied that the American Psychiatric Association excised it from its vocabulary.  No, passive-aggressive does not mean “playing the victim.”  It doesn’t mean that one is martyrizing oneself.  It indicates that someone is asserting oneself in a minatory, hostile manner by refusing to do something that one is expected to do.  The term suggests sullenness and surliness.  It suggests non-participativeness and inexpressiveness.  It suggests someone who wants to acerbate other people by ostentatiously not playing along.  A passive-aggressive person is the antithesis of the team-player, and there is a sense that such an unlikable person wants the active players in the community to know that s/he doesn’t like them.

Judgmental

“My mom is so judgmental to people it’s outrageous.”  All conscious human beings make judgments all of the time.  What the writer means is that her mother passes negative judgments upon people and does so excessively.  There is an adjective for this trait, and that adjective is…

Censorious

“Society is so censorious today compared to the late 20^th century.”  The word for which the writer is groping in vain is censorial.  Censorious means “excessively fault-finding,” “captious,” “caviling,” “carping.”  Someone is censorial if that person has the tendency to exercise censorship.

Self-Aware

“Our teacher is not at all self-aware that she talks over the end of the class and we have jobs and other classes to get to.  She has zero self-awareness.”  Why do I have the impression that when people use the word self-aware, they actually mean “aware of others”?

Empaths

“The social worker is such an empath.  He makes everyone feel welcome and always asks how we are doing.”  An empath is not merely someone who is sensitive, accommodating, and compassionate.  Someone who is empathic is a person who can imaginarily represent to oneself how another human being is feeling.

Narcissists

I will follow Kohut in asseverating that narcissism is an essential structure of the human personality and is not exclusively a personality disorder.  It seems to me, as it seemed to Kohut, that narcissists regard other human beings as specula—as mirrors.  This is more than selfishness or self-interestedness.  A narcissist is a speculist of the Self-in-others.

Regret

To be regretful is to wish you had done something.  To be remorseful is to wish you hadn’t done something.  Thus, it is an instance of misapplication to say or to write: “They treated me badly all those years ago, but now that I am famous, they regret what they did to me.”  I myself have made this mistake an uncountable number of times.

Intentional

“I’ve been very intentional about my dating-goals.”  Well, good for you!  You mean that you carefully set your dating-goals.  The adjective intentional should not be coupled with a human subject.  A person cannot be intentional—this makes absolutely no sense.   A person might have the intention to do something, or a person might do something intentionally.  “I have set my dating-goals decidedly (or undecidedly)” would be justifiable.  Or: “I have set my dating-goals with intentness.”  “To do something with intentness” is not a common phrase, it is true (one can find it in the writings of D. H. Lawrence), but it makes much more sense than “to be intentional about doing something.”

Dr. Joseph Suglia