Please be advised that this is a commentary on words, not the underlying reasons the words have taken on a life of their own in 2020.
First, “unprecedented.” We’ve seen it EVERYWHERE: from politicians to business leaders to advertisers to the sweet little woman that lives down the street. I think her name’s Mary. I pulled some Google Trends data to confirm that the use of unprecedented is, in fact, unprecedented. And with the exception of a small blip in December 2016 (thanks to Donald Trump), it is. The good news (for me), its use has started to drop off:
In case you are curious, and I suspect you are, the December blip was a result of the following tweet from our fearless leader who fumbled a bit with his spelling of “unprecedented”:
What isn’t on the decline is the use of the word “systemic”. In fact, it blows “unprecedented” out of the water.
I am definitely not a linguist (although I did play one on a little known radio show broadcast in Liechtenstein, circa 1983), but I find it fascinating that people tend to gravitate to the language used by their social circles (in this case, the circle being the United States). I worked on Microsoft for a number of years in San Francisco and the Microsoft team at McCann SF literally adopted the Microsoft way of speaking. You didn’t send an “e-mail”, you sent a “mail”. No one else at McCann spoke that way.
So while I’m not one to try to bust a trend, please consider using any of the following words the next time you really, really want to say: “systemic”…
Fundamental.
Integral.
Intrinsic.
Essential.
Innate.
Congenital.
Elemental.
Ingrained.
Inherent.
All synonyms courtesy of https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/systemic.
Are there any words you and your social circle use that few others do? Comment below.
p.s. the bit about the radio show may not be true.
Northampton Consulting 