It’s Absurd — And Not Prudent — To Tag All Evildoers That Way With Such Resolve
If nothing else, we’ll finally get to the point where we no longer have to double check the spelling:
Posted: April 29th, 2008 | Filed under: Followed By A Perplexed Stroke Of The ChinWhen a court awarded $308,000 in 2003 to a Bronx woman who slipped on a snowy sidewalk, the decision was “unconscionable.” When the city’s transit workers went on strike in 2005, their walkout was “unconscionable.” And when Mayor Bloomberg contemplated the possibility earlier this month that the State Assembly might not bring his congestion pricing plan to a vote, the mere thought of such a thing was — you guessed it — “unconscionable.”
As a way to express outrage, linguists say the word is an effective choice. It sounds more astute than “terrible.” It has more syllables than “disgraceful.” It has a certain weight that “unbelievable” and “disgraceful” lack.
And the word implies a subtle yet stinging critique of Mr. Bloomberg’s antagonists: that they lack a conscience. Because its meaning is so loaded, some linguists wondered whether Mr. Bloomberg might be using the word a little too liberally.
“It is a strong word and has a little bit of heft,” said Ben Zimmer, the editor of Visual Thesaurus, a Web site that charts synonyms and their relationships to one another. “So in terms of style, it might be better to use it less frequently.”
. . .
It became one of his favorite adjectives to describe the strike by Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees in 2005, which shut down the city’s subway system for three days during a frigid snap of weather right before Christmas. “This is a strike that is deliberately designed to take place at a time of the year when it can hurt the most people the quickest,” he said. “It is just unconscionable.”
Apparently, “unconscionable” alone was insufficient to describe the mayor’s outrage. During the strike he used the word on more than one occasion with a string of other colorful adjectives like “thuggish,” “cowardly” and “reprehensible.”
By using the word with such regularity, however, linguists said Mr. Bloomberg might be dulling its bite — a process they called amelioration.