Depending on who you ask, “the last frontier” is either space, the bottom of the ocean, the Alaskan wilderness, or a mediocre 1950s film. Lacking the capacity to explore any of those things—barring the final, for which I lack the interest—I explore the English language instead. (And watch a lot of YouTube videos about shipwrecks.)

English is ideal for exploration because it is so vast. Some claim that it is the language with the largest vocabulary, but that question is so tangled and nuanced as to be unanswerable. (Notwithstanding any claim that leads me to feel any vague national or ethnic pride is suspect these days, and that’s without the grim fact that one of the best ways to ensure your language proliferates—in terms of speakers and vocabulary—is centuries of colonialism.)

Regardless, English is a large enough language that I, a native speaker approaching thirty years of use, am still discovering its pockets and peculiarities—and not just when new words are added (which are more likely to have the effect of making me feel like an eighty-year-old user of the language and also likely to be banished by the year’s end anyway).

Being the kind of person who’s been so excited by new words as to keep journals of them (I learned “avulse” just today!), it’s easy for me to fall into the trap of using the most precise or exciting word for a situation when what is called for is instead the clearest or the simplest. Eschew obfuscation, as my high school English teacher would say, an adage that is never truer than in my work at the public library.

The first word I learned to excise was “surname,” the use of which was honestly a rookie error on my part and no great loss. “Surname” is not an exciting word and no more precise in most circumstances than “last name,” unless you have managed a feat worthy of “the Great,” which, honestly, you haven’t.

Sacrificing the objectively correct “PIN” to the redundant but clearer “PIN number” was more painful. In answer to a similar question posed by Miles Morales in Across the Spiderverse, people say “PIN number,” even though the N stands for number, because when you ask people about their library PIN, they often hear “pen” and even if they don’t they often get confused that a concept so otherwise thoroughly relegated to banking is showing up in their library card application process. If feeling angsty about this one, feel free to switch “PIN” with “password,” which means the same thing in our context anyway.

“Y’all” is the weird one because I’ve only ever been south of the Mason-Dixon line a handful of times in my life (mostly to go to Washington DC and Florida, which don’t count). I’m also willing to die on the hill that “you guys” is a gender-neutral term of address but will roll off of it if there’s a chance that my hilltop corpse will cause someone needless discomfort. So it’s “y’all” for the Pride event outreach table, regional sensitivity be damned.

Some nuances are not vocabulary-specific. For years I avoided saying “have a good night” to patrons experiencing homelessness for fear that it was somehow rude to do so when the person I was saying it to would probably not, at least by my standards, be having a good one. I’ve since discovered that including everyone, especially people who are often excluded, in the inane rituals of societal life might be more kind than presuming things about their situations once they leave the library. And also that “see you later” works just fine too.

And there are others. Some people don’t know what an “internet browser” is so “however you normally get online” becomes more economical in the long term. Clarifying up front if someone actually needs a copy when they say “copy” or if they instead need to print is another time saver.

This sort of code-switching is not unique to librarianship and is relatively fairly tame; the dance is avoiding both the kind of elitism that uses needlessly obtuse words and the one that assumes others won’t understand them.

Because while I find the fun of English to be its capacity for precision, there is more kindness in clarity.

1 Comment

  1. Hannah McNulty

    I deal with a similar thought process in my job, because I’m often emailing people from different countries who speak English as a second language. I feel like I end up reconsidering idioms a lot as a result. Like, I stopped myself from saying “you beat me to the punch” once because if they weren’t familiar with the idiom, it was going to sound strangely violent. Always interesting to consider how your words sound to people with different experiences from you.

    Reply

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