Minimum Impact

I was rereading Getting to Yes, the classic on negotiation from Roger Fischer and William Ury, when I came upon this wonderfully nuanced sentence: “You will have not only a strong interest in affecting any agreement you reach, but also one in effecting an agreement.” [italics authors’] What a difference a letter makes, I thought, and what a fine-tuned distinction.

            A moment later, though, it struck me that, in the not too distant future, that sentence may be not admirable, but incomprehensible.   (Compare for example, this sentence:  “She was a buxom maid, but I determined that her homely sister would make me a much better wife.”  A few centuries ago, any reader would have realized that the speaker was not referring to the torso of one lady or the face of the other, but rather to one’s lively, cheerful disposition and the other’s domestic skills.) 

            The villain in the piece is, of course, impact.  Technically, impact first meant “to pack together,” or “to strike against, collide.”  This is why we still say, “the passengers died upon impact.”  It also had two very special use: bones and especially teeth are impacted when they are jammed together in a way requiring surgical intervention, and impact wrenches combine torque with car-crash force.  These are the only definitions accepted by the 1971 American Heritage, for example, nor is any sense of affect for impact mentioned in the OED.

            With almost unimaginable speed, however, impact became, first a noun for the effect on something, and then a verb for affecting something.  The Free Online Dictionary notes that as recently as 2001, 80-85% of its usage panel objected to impact as a verb meaning affect. Now, in the mere space of a decade, the dictionary concedes “the verbal use of impact has become so common in the working language of corporations and institutions that many speakers have begun to regard it as standard.”

            I am a descriptive linguist.  I believe that a word means what its users mean by it.  I am sad, for example, that “gay” has a new meaning that makes lines like “Glitter and be Gay” from Bernstein’s Candide strike the ear a bit oddly, but I can  accept the new meaning, because it gives us a simple and judgment-free word for the clinical label formerly employed to marginalize a group of people.  After all, trying to prevent language changing is exactly like King Cnut sitting by the shore and commanding the oncoming tides not to wet his robes. 

            Yet when a word change costs us something in specificity and nuance, I retain the right to object, however futilely.  Impact not only seems to me a lazy way to avoid learning the distinction between affect and effect (a problem enhanced by psychology’s cooption of affect to mean the physical expression of one’s emotions).  It is also a matter of lost connotation. Impact, after all, always meant something bad.  No couple ever ran towards each other and kissed upon impact.  No returning soldier was ever impacted by a spouse’s or child’s hug. 

            Things now not only impact, they impact on, and are impactful.  We have businesses named “Impact Racing “ (helmets for potential collisions), Impact Supplies (cleaning, maintenance and safety supplies?), and Impact Guns (I’ll let that that one pass).  Does the word merely appeal to our desire to avoid complicated distinctions? Or is it a sign of our penchant for the violent, the aggressive, the biggest bang for the buck? (A feminist colleague of mine once stopped a speaker who had used that cliché with the announcement, “that metaphor is either military or sexual, and in either case, I object.”)

            I doubt this screed will impact upon impact’s impactful impact on our language, but I persevere in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most misunderstood observation: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

            I promise no more linguistic curmudgeonry for at least a month.