21st century Wordwatch – infamy
For some years now I (like several others) have been keeping a check on the current use of our language. The speed of change is astonishing. We think of English as a stable medium, a means whereby we can communicate clearly on every subject. That’s important – but English is adaptable too, admitting new words and phrases when they seem valuable. The language has always enjoyed this flexibility, and is the better for it. To notice a novelty in language isn’t necessarily to disapprove of it. For instance, many new expressions come to us from the United States – they’ve been coming for at least two hundred years, and we’ve found them useful and sometimes really entertaining: Americans are as inventive with words as with all their domestic appliances, and have a wonderful ear for the fresh and pithy. They have also perpetrated some of the most unfortunate violations of ‘good’ English: they don’t always seem to think about they write, either as sound or as sense.
And our own scribblers are as bad. It astonishes me that people who make writing their business, and claim to know how to use words, can make a habit of producing ugly and even incoherent word-sequences, without apology. Most changes to language use are a result of ignorance, and I’m not under the illusion that I – or the numerous other commentators on language – can divert the Gadarene rush, but there is some satisfaction to be had from recording specific instances. And there are occasions when important meanings are lost simply because users of English have forgotten, or not been taught, what those meanings signify. Here’s the first entry in my dictionary of the new English:
Infamous
For most of my life, “infamous” was used in accordance with the dictionary definitions. Chambers is categorical: “infamous” means “having a reputation of the worst kind; publicly branded with guilt; notoriously vile, disgraceful”. The OED gives “Of ill fame or repute; famed or notorious for badness of any kind … notoriously evil, wicked, or vile”. Chambers also gives “notorious” as a meaning, but there’s a clear distinction: “notorious” simply informs us that a certain person, place etc., has a bad reputation, with no direct moral judgement attached. “Infamous” always implied the severest moral disapproval. Staff at Appleby Free School, founded c.1680, were to be dismissed “if found to be of infamous Life upon Evident Proof”. In Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1892): “…as for Lord Illingworth, I don’t believe he is capable of anything infamous or base.” (Act 3).
We never seemed to have a problem with “infamy” – (“Infamy, infamy – they’ve all got it in for me” – Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar in Carry on Cleo, 1964). But over the last twenty years or so, the clear-cut meaning of “infamous” has dissolved. The problem seems to have arisen because of the apparent opposition of “infamous” and “famous”. But why would an experienced writer like Peter Ackroyd, for instance, suddenly worry about that? In his life of Dickens, 1990, we find: “… the customary barbs of the infamous against the famous …”. But then instances of the new use come thick and fast, and I can’t help wondering if American academe has played a part in the downfall.
“Considering Leighton’s problems … it is hardly surprising to find him in 1872 addressing the issue of London’s infamous black fogs.” (Joseph Frank Lamb, Lions in their Dens: Lord Leighton and Late Victorian Studio Life, PhD thesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1987) .
“The infamous allegory of Fortuna, painted by Salvator Rosa in 1658/59 … was widely understood to have been a satirical attack on the vagaries of official patronage in Rome ….” (article in The Burlington Magazine, August 1991). And from a Scottish writer: “… Bryan Forbes’s now infamous production of Macbeth …” Gilbert Adair, The Postmodernist always Rings Twice, 1992, p. 119.
A fog, a painting, a Shakespeare production, – all characterized as “infamous”. True, Macbeth is an infamous character, but a play about him surely can’t be. “Infamous” seems to have come to mean “bad” in a virtually non-moral sense. It gets even stranger. “Although some dodos were hunted and eaten, the species was infamously driven to extinction within a hundred years by the arrival of cats, rats and pigs on the island.” (D. Telegraph, 20 November 2003). “Sadly” or “unfortunately” might do the job better here, I should think.
“Tiny Rowland was one of Britain’s most infamous businessmen.” Headline, Evening Standard, 4 January 2006. If Tiny Rowland were still alive, he’d be entitled to sue; “notorious” would have made better sense, and is quite strong enough – but he might have seen it as a compliment.
“In August 1814 Lord Byron’s publisher, John Murray, approached Coleridge … and invited him to translate Goethe’s infamous drama in exchange for £100” (Kelly Grovier in Times Literary Supplement, 15 Feb 2008). The work in question is Goethe’s great verse drama Faust. Infamous? Come off it! Controversial, yes, perhaps.
The final debasement of an important word, Summer 2011: sign at the Abbey Mill Restaurant, Tintern: “Home of Tintern’s Infamous Dragon Pie”.
And in March 2012 The Oldie published a note from a reader citing “the infamous Battle of Britain pilots”. The word has indeed lost its meaning and actually been redefined to mean the opposite.
If “infamous” only implies mild, sometimes, humorous, disapproval, what on earth shall we say to register profound disgust or outrage at anyone’s behaviour? How shall we describe the Eichmanns and the Pol Pots of this world? Don’t some words need a protection order on them, simply so that we retain our ability to make fine moral distinctions? Or has relativism won the war, and absolute evil is abolished along with precise meaning, courtesy of the English language?