Although there are alternative words available, English welcomes synonymy. In sum, impactful entered English as a normal part of language growth and change, and there is no legitimate linguistic reason to reject it. Impactful may eventually settle into the language in similar fashion. When added to a verb, -ful has the meaning “apt to” or “able to,” as in mournful, wakeful, forgetful, and worshipful. But if impactful is indeed derived from the verb rather than the noun-which is not a certainty-there is nothing ungrammatical about that. The aversion to impactful is reinforced by the distaste some people have for its root impact, especially when that word is used as a verb. Both of these senses of -ful work perfectly well with the noun impact. In other common adjectives, -ful can even be glossed as “causing feelings of,” as in wonderful and dreadful. Instead, the suffix is interpreted as “having” or “characterized by,” as in beautiful, lawful, or graceful. In fact, as the Oxford English Dictionary points out, the “full of” sense is considerably weakened in a large number of these -ful adjectives. But impactful, when it entered English in the mid-1960s, was formed and construed in the same way as other well-established adjectives ending in -ful. Some justify their scorn by saying that the word lacks the original meaning of the suffix -ful -“full of”- as in remorseful or wrathful. According to its critics, the word exemplifies “bad, ugly usage.” They call it “barbarous,” dismiss it as “a meaningless buzzword,” and hate it so much that they extend their contempt of the word to contempt for its users. Impactful is one of those words that somehow arouse intense disdain, especially among editors and other would-be guardians of English.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |