Word Watch: Vibrancy

We’ve just received a thank you letter from someone who came to ours for lunch recently. It’s a particular pleasure to be treated to written thanks in an age when people – old and young – often think it unnecessary to express gratitude for hospitality. Not so long ago it was a matter of course to put pen to paper for that purpose. Now, if we do it at all, we use email, and the recipient thinks that a great favour. On this occasion, our grateful guest added that it had been a special pleasure to be welcomed into our “vibrant home”.

The phraseology immediately made think that the writer was American. “Home” is a frequent substitute for “house” in American English. But no, my correspondent is English, and the use of “home” yet another instance of the Americanisation of the English language in all its minutiae. But the word that particularly arrested my attention was “vibrant”. Happy though we are with our domestic surroundings it has never occurred to us to describe them as “vibrant”. In what way can the word be so applied? 

According to the Cambridge dictionary the word means: “The quality of being energetic, exciting, and full of enthusiasm”: by association, “vibrant” can therefore mean “thrilling” or “resonant” and it is in some such sense as that that we must understand our friend’s compliment, which now begins to feel rather strained. How many people would describe, or want to describe, their own home (and here that’s the appropriate word) as “resonant” or “thrilling”? 

“Vibrancy” is a noun derived from the word “vibrant” which is related to a verb “to vibrate”, whose root is the Latin “vibrare”, to tremble or shake. The word is an adjective, the related noun being “vibrancy”.  

Here’s another recent use of the term: read the desiderata of the organisers of an American literary Prize, as noted in an advertisement for the prize in the London Review of Books, August 2022: “The NYU Axinn Foundation Prize … celebrates distinguished work in artistic literary narrative nonfiction by a writer whose career is in full vibrancy”.

We might speak of a career, especially in any of the creative arts, as “flourishing”, “productive” or “in full flow”. But would anyone, who didn’t wish to impress us with a novel turn of phrase, come up with “in full vibrancy”? To employ the phrase seems to introduce an element of exaggeration that glamorises the everyday to an extent that I, for one, find embarrassing. 

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