Effete Here’s a word on which some dictionaries and usage authorities haven’t quite caught up with the realities of literate usage. Yes, the traditional meaning of effete is “depleted of vitality, washed out, exhausted”—and in a college paper for an older prof. you’d probably want to use it in only that way. But a great many educated people accept effete now also as a pejorative synonym for elite or elitist, one with an added suggestion of effeminacy, over-refinement, pretension, and/or decadence; and in this writer’s opinion it is not a boner to use effete this way, since no other word has quite its connotative flavor. Traditionalists who see the extended definition as an error often blame Spiro Agnew’s characterization of some liberal group or other as an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” but there are deeper reasons for the extension, such as that effete derives from the Latin eff
tus, which meant “worn out from bearing children” and thus had an obvious feminine connotation. Or that historically effete was often used to describe artistic movements that had exhausted their vitality, and one of the main characteristics of a kind of art’s exhaustion was its descent into excessive refinement or foppery or decadence.
Dialogue Noun-wise, the interesting thing about dialogue is that it means “a conversation or exchange between two or more people,” so it’s not wrong to say something like “The council engaged in a long dialogue about the proposal.” Avoid modifying it with certain adjectives, though—constructive dialogue and meaningful dialogue have, thanks mainly to political cant, become clichés that will make readers’ eyes glaze over. Please also avoid using dialogue as a verb — ever. This is despite the facts that (1) Shakespeare used it as a verb, and (2) There are all sorts of other accepted verbalizations of nouns in English that work the same way; e.g., to diet is reduced from “to go on a diet,” to trap from “to catch in a trap,” and so on. Maybe in thirty years, to dialogue will be just as standard, but as of now it strikes most literate readers as affected and jargonish. Same with to transition; same with to parent.
Privilege Even though some dictionaries OK it, to privilege is currently used only in a particular English subdialect that might be called academese. Example: “The patriarchal Western canon privileges univocal discourse situated within established contexts over the polyphonic free play of decentered utterance.” The contemporary form of this subdialect originated in literary and social theory but has now metastasized throughout much of the humanities. There is exactly one situation in which you’d want to use to privilege, to situate, to interrogate + some abstract noun phrase, or pretty much any construction that’s three times longer than it needs to be — this is in a university course taught by a prof. so thoroughly cloistered, insecure, or stupid as to believe that academese is good intelligent writing. A required course, one that you can’t switch out of. In any other situation, run very fast the other way.
Myriad As an adj., myriad means (1) an indefinitely large number of something (“The Local Group comprises myriad galaxies”) or (2) made up of a great many diverse elements (“the myriad plant life of Amazonia”). As a noun, it’s used with an article and of to mean a large number (“The new CFO faced a myriad of cash-flow problems.”) What’s odd is that some authorities consider only the adjective usage correct — there’s about a 50–50 chance that a given copyeditor will query a myriad of—even though the noun usage has a much longer history. It was only in nineteenth-century poetry that myriad started being used as an adj. So it’s a bit of a stumper. It’s tempting to recommend avoiding the noun usage so that no readers will be bugged, but at the same time it’s true that any reader who’s bugged by a myriad of is both persnickety and wrong — and you can usually rebut snooty teachers, copyeditors, et al. by directing them to Coleridge’s “Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth.”
Dysphesia This is a medical noun with timely non-medical applications. We often use aphasia to refer to a brain-centered inability to use language, which is close but not identical to the medical meaning. Dysphesia can be similarly extended from its technical definition to mean really severe difficulties in forming coherent sentences. As anyone who’s listened to our current president knows, there are speakers whose lack of facility goes way beyond the range of clumsy or inarticulate. What G. W. Bush’s public English really is is dysphesiac.
Unique This is one of a class of adjectives, sometimes called “uncomparables,” that can be a little tricky. Among other uncomparables are precise, exact, correct, entire, accurate, preferable, inevitable, possible, false; there are probably two dozen in all. These adjectives all describe absolute, non-negotiable states: something is either false or it’s not; something is either inevitable or it’s not. Many writers get careless and try to modify uncomparables with comparatives like more and less or intensives like very. But if you really think about them, the core assertions in sentences like “War is becoming increasingly inevitable as Middle East tensions rise,” “Their cost estimate was more accurate than the other firms’,” and “As a mortician, he has a very unique attitude” are nonsense. If something is inevitable, it is bound to happen; it cannot be bound to happen and then somehow even more bound to happen. Unique already means one-of-a-kind, so the adj. phrase very unique is at best redundant and at worst stupid, like “audible to the ear” or “rectangular in shape.” Uncomparable-type boners can be easily fixed—“War is looking increasingly inevitable”; “Their cost estimate was more nearly accurate”; “he has a unique attitude”—but for writers the hard part is noticing such errors in the first place. You can blame the culture of marketing for some of this difficulty. As the number and rhetorical volume of U.S. ads increase, we become inured to hyperbolic language, which then forces marketers to load superlatives and uncomparables with high-octane modifiers (special → very special → Super-special! → Mega-Special!!), and so on. A deeper issue implicit in the problem of uncomparables is the dissimilarities between Standard Written English and the language of advertising. Advertising English, which probably deserves to be studied as its own dialect, operates under different syntactic rules than SWE, mainly because AE’s goals and assumptions are different. Sentences like “We offer a totally unique dining experience,” “Come on down and receive your free gift,” and “Save up to 50 percent… and more!” are perfectly OK in Advertising English — but this is because Advertising English is aimed at people who are not paying close attention. If your audience is by definition involuntary, distracted, and numbed, then free gift and totally unique stand a better chance of penetrating — and simple penetration is what AE is all about. The goals and assumptions of Standard Written English are obviously way more complex, but one SWE axiom is that your reader is paying close attention and expects you to have done the same.