But over time, good, old-fashioned ghost stories have lost some of their ability to spook. While many of you reading this might prefer a fireside reading of Edgar Allen Poe, most Americans will be off at Paranormal Activity 3. But aside from all the additional competition and our ever-shrinking attention spans, it seems that words themselves—certain words that used to chill, frighten, horrify, spook, and plenty of other synonyms for scares—have lost their power to petrify. For example: creepy. When it first joined the language in 1831, this adjective referred to “the sensation of the flesh creeping in horror.” But it no longer creeps out too many people, particularly the members of Generation Text. As University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman observed on his blog, Language Log, teenagers are using the expression “That’s so creepy…” to qualify coincidental or unexpected bits of news, as in “You were there, too? That’s so creepy!” or “Isn’t it creepy how she called at the last minute?” In a subsequent post, Liberman charted the similar taming of other formerly scary words, including: Picking up where he left off, word blogger Nancy Friedman published the results of her own investigation: As Friedman points out, even the very notion of being “afraid” has lamed out: “All we hear is ‘I’m afraid…I’m going to have to ask you to work late.’” This is not to say that we are necessarily using words improperly* when we say something like, “Boy, that herb garden of yours has tremendous potential, Harold.” Words are meant to be used, and their definitions evolve accordingly. But we should nonetheless be aware of the historical capacity and, well, tremendous potential of the words we use. *Though sometimes we do. One personal pet peeve: describing something funny as “hysterical.” That’s just wrong—hysterical means driven to or prone to hysterics, so there’s no such thing as a hysterical joke or a hysterical movie (though either could drive one to hysterical laughter). And yes, the term’s now common usage as meaning “extremely humorous” has made its way into the dictionary. But just because it’s in the dictionary doesn’t mean it’s correct. So tomorrow night, if some kid, perhaps dressed as a vampire or a pirate or Mitt Romney, comes to your door and yells “Trick or Treat!” hold him to his word: Ask for a trick.
