Verbal Inflation

Some of you may have wondered why I write out the word "God" rather than using the circumlocution "G-d" as many/most Ortho-bloggers do. This is quite deliberate; I feel on principle that writing "G-d" is unnecessary and even borders on the pretentious. This view has been supported by no less an authority than Rav Soloveichik, who famously, when asked by a student whether it was necessary to write "G-d" in place of "God", answered by walking up to the blackboard, writing "God", and immediately erasing it.

As background, the source for the practice of writing "G-d" is the prohibition of erasing or unnecessarily writing the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter most holy Divine name, spelled in Hebrew with a "Yud", a "Hey", a "Vav", and another "Hey", and not read aloud nowadays but pronounced as "Adonoy" ["Lord"] in reciting blessings or reading the Torah. This initial prohibition was reasonably extended to include erasure of less central, but still holy Divine names in Hebrew. Extending this stricture to synonyms in languages other than the holy tongue was, in the Rav's opinion a generation ago, going too far.

And it hasn't stopped there! To show how ridiculous things have gotten: the word "Hashem" - meaning literally "the name" - is often used conversationally instead of pronouncing even the word "Adonoy" unnecessarily. Well, now my kids bring home sheets from school with "Hashem" written as "H-shem". What's next? Pass the "ginger kale"? I'm waiting for someone to decide that we need to leave our wallets outside the door of the bathroom because money has "In God We Trust" written on it.

Of course this "verbal inflation" is not unique to Orthodox Judaism but is part of a general trend, led by Madison Avenue but pervasive throughout society. When I was a kid you could buy "small", "medium", and "large" drinks - now it's "large", "extra large" and "super" (aka "you'll be taking this kid to the bathroom all through the movie"). We can all think of numerous other examples. The net effect is to deaden the ability for language to convey meaning and make it more difficult for people to communicate clearly.

What actually got me thinking about this issue was a commercial for a credit card company I heard on the radio this morning. It told the story of a woman who had ordered a very specific cabinet from a furniture vendor, only to have it delivered with several errors - wrong size, color, etc. The point of the ad was that the credit card company agreed to cancel the charge, even though the vendor would not make good. But what struck me was the storyteller's statement that when the wrong cabinet was delivered, "I was devastated". Devastated?? Over a less than perfect piece of furniture? What word then is left to use for this? Or this? Or even this?

But I won't say that this linguistic degeneration makes me furious. Annoyed should do.