I refute what you are referencing

My friend Tony and I live a couple of hundred miles apart and, though we both also have houses in France, we maintain the same safe distance there.

This explains why we hardly ever see each other more often than once a year. Since we’ve been friends for some 35 years, that’s about as many encounters over half a lifetime. Nevertheless, thanks to the wonders of technology, we probably spend an average of at least three to four hours a week on the phone.

You do the maths but, in round numbers, that’s a lot of talking. Penelope apart, and yes, I know it’s hopelessly infra dig to talk to one’s own wife, I don’t think I spend as much time chatting with anyone else.

Since Tony is an atheist, our conversations stay close to the ground, mainly because any attempt to soar higher bores him to tears and he switches off. So we keep to current events, especially those that confirm our shared dim view of modernity, and also things like art, architecture – and language.

When this last subject comes up, we tend to swap our pet peeves about the wounds English suffers at the hands of modernity.

For both of us language isn’t just what we use but also what we do. It’s our instrument in the same sense in which the piano is Penelope’s instrument, and she would be aghast if someone took a sledgehammer to it.

The two words in the title above came up earlier today, with ‘to reference’ being my contribution and ‘to refute’ Tony’s. We disagreed on which one was worse, but agreed that both were appalling when misused.

Unlike the favourite word of our football commentators, ‘lacksadaisical’, the two words we find objectionable do exist. But God in whom Tony doesn’t believe created them to denote something dramatically different from the way our illiterate hacks use them.

‘To reference’ something means to cite an established source supporting one’s statement. This is routinely done in scholarly literature, with footnotes, endnotes and bibliography used for that purpose. When an editor tells me “You need to reference this”, I recognise the validity of the verb, even though I wince at its ungainliness and deplore the extra effort required.

I believe firmly that verbs are verbs, nouns are nouns, and never the twain should meet. Verbs made out of nouns are always jarring, although at times they are unavoidable, as in this case.

Alas, the way ‘to reference’ is widely used these days, even in writing, isn’t only jarring but also illiterate, pretentious and generally offensive. Lexically underdeveloped individuals use it in place of ‘to say’ or ‘to mention’, words they regard as inadequate to communicate the culture they haven’t got.

Thus one often hears abominations like “as I referenced yesterday”, with nary a cited source anywhere in sight. What the sledgehammer wielder means is “as I said yesterday”, but such a monosyllabic is five syllables short of what ignoramuses see as sophistication.

In his entertaining 1983 book Class, Paul Fussell referred to that sort of thing as a ‘prole syllable creep’, but that book was written before the wrong people scored the final victory in the class war. Today this craving for extra syllables at any cost is more likely to be caused by cultural rather than social pretensions. That doesn’t make it any less risible though.

Bad as that ugly solecism is, in the end I had to agree with Tony that the misuse of ‘to refute’ is even worse. ‘To reference’ testifies only to the speaker’s tin ear and ignorance he tries to mask, only succeeding in making it even plainer.

The use of ‘to refute’ to mean ‘to deny’, in addition to other deadly sins, also betokens the decommissioning of the most basic intellectual tools. Someone who says “as I referenced yesterday” doesn’t know how to use English. But someone who says “I refute what you are saying” also doesn’t know how to use his mind.

A refutation is a conclusive argument using evidence to disprove a statement. It means more than just denial or disagreement, neither of which requires any proof. Using it the illiterate way brands the speaker as someone who doesn’t know what constitutes an argument and what kind of argument can provide a refutation.

In the days when we still had educated classes, as opposed to isolated educated individuals, common folk made do with a vocabulary of under 2,000 words, most of them short and of Anglo-Saxon origin. They never misused longer words of Latin or Greek etymology because they didn’t know them.

Whenever they misused ‘posh’ words they had overheard by accident, educated people exchanged knowing smiles, reserving open derision for literature. Dickens, for one, was scathing about pretentious solecisms, which today would earn him the tag of elitist and, by ricochet, also possibly misogynist, transphobic and of course racist.

The OED helpfully informs us that the verb ‘to refute’ doesn’t enjoy a high frequency of use. It occurs only once per 200,000 words in modern written English. I suspect its correct use is much less widespread.

Language is indeed an instrument of oral and written communication. But it’s also a cultural and social indicator, a sort of compass showing the direction taken by society.

When England sat at the centre of a flourishing empire, her language was dynamic and creative. It was constantly expanding, but without losing its beauty and unmatched precision.

Even when lent out to various colonies, it didn’t suffer much attrition. Moreover, cross-Atlantic colonies enriched English with their own quaint, idiosyncratic usages (Tony dislikes them anyway).

England – and I’d suggest the Anglophone world in general – is undergoing a cultural and social collapse, and hence so is the English language. Rather than expanding, it’s actually contracting, in any area other than the profusion of specialised terminology.

English is getting smaller, uglier and much less precise, which to both Tony and me parallels and reflects similar tendencies in culture, along with the life of the mind and spirit. And if you wish to refute what I’m referencing, you’d better come up with sound arguments.