This does not make Abilify a seeming candidate for popular usage on the order of amazeballs.Īnd yet.… A warning arrived in my in-box yesterday morning via The Vocabula Review, a daily language newsletter compiled by Robert Hartwell Fiske, who has authored books like Robert Hartwell Fiske's Dictionary of Unendurable English and To The Point: A Dictionary of Concise Writing.įiske is a sort of fire-watcher of suspect usage: The most amusing aspect of his daily newsletter (which he says has 5,000 subscribers) is the "disagreeable English" screed that rails against the Visigoths who know not, say, the difference between literally and figuratively, who use parameter outside of trigonometry class, who mistake affect for effect. Its generic name is Aripiprazole its chemical structure is 7-butoxy]-3,4-dihydrocarbostyril. One branch of this pop-culture lexical invasion is the brand name that comes to encapsulate a whole class of object: Xerox for all copiers being probably the most prevalent example of such corporatist synecdoche.Īnd then there is Abilify, which is a drug that helps thousands but also a word that, to some, illustrates the uncomfortable nexus of language and marketing.Ībilify is an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as other conditions (it is sometimes given for autism, for example). But it is also the language of side boob.
Yes, it is still the language of Shakespeare. Among the words recently ushered into the august Oxford English Dictionary (or at least its online counterpart) are YOLO and amazeballs. So thorough has been pop culture's assault on the English language that even the high priests of diction have ceded the inner sanctum.
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