Alcoholic - The Word

By: Jack Wilson
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:37:04
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Any language evolves like Topsy, it just grows and nobody controls it. Even in countries where there are academies whose task it is to keep the language pristine, the language does what the people who use it choose for it to do. This results in words and phrases called idioms. That means that the words don’t mean what they ought to mean. This makes life difficult for anyone trying to learn a new language.

One of the negative results of this kind of unfettered usage is that it encourages prejudice. The word “alcoholic” is an example.

Properly used, the word refers to a substance which contains alcohol; an alcoholic beverage or candy or dessert, or medicine.

As an idiom it refers to a person who is addicted to alcohol. By terming that person an alcoholic, it is suggested that the person is responsible for his condition and has deliberately chosen that status.

Compare this to a person who is addicted to caffeine. There is no word that has that negative connotation that applies to a coffee drinker, no matter how much the caffeine impairs his abilities. Imagine using the word “caffeinic”.

A smoker of tobacco, regardless of how much harm he does to his body and his fellow citizens will never be referred to as a nicotinic.

If you use the model for a nicotine addict: smoker, you would call an alcohol addict a drinker, a caffeine addict a drinker, a heroine addict an injector.

The idea that a person addicted to alcohol at one time and now free of that addiction is ‘recovering’ is equally prejudicial. Imagine calling a person who has successfully given up smoking a recovering nicotinic. Worse, a cancer victim in remission as a recovering canceric.

If we believe that any addiction is chemical/biological plus perhaps psychological/emotional, then it is in our best interest as a society to treat these conditions both medically and in our choice of words used to describe those afflicted.

Many idioms start as ways for insecure bullies to taunt others so as to make themselves feel better and to give themselves power. Idioms are fun, like stand-up comics putting down everyone else, like roasts pointing out the deficiencies of others. These are immature expressions designed to hurt. Very much the stuff of middle-school.

Language will ever be thus and it certainly makes for a richness of expression, but we can make an effort as individual speakers and writers to use language as thoughtfully as we can.

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Jack Wilson is a writer, artist, musician and recovering teacher in Tempe, Arizona.

http://www.geocities.com/galimatio/jackwilson.html

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