I hate the word ‘utilize’.

There is an art form to selecting words. One mustn’t be drab, nor overly verbose. Large words should be used for clarity and precision in terms of expressing one’s intent. They should NOT be used to merely for the sake of making the speaker sound smarter or more official. As my wonderful philosophy professor once lectured, this makes your writing [or speaking] ‘fluffy’. It takes up lots of space, but has little substance. Further, if one is hellbent on using an impressive sounding word, make damn sure it means what you think it means. When people violate these two rules, I think back to that professor and how I ought to correct the culprits in his honour. Guillermo, this post is for you.

The first example of the misuse of words comes straight from the lecture that ultimately inspired this post. ‘Utilize’. This word is the epitome of ‘fluffy’ language. There is not one instance where the word ‘utilize’ adds any meaning that could not be derived from the word ‘use’.
Indeed, the only time ‘utilize’ is used is when the speaker/writer wants to sound smart and gain extra credibility without earning it. Try it out. The next time you hear someone say ‘utilize’, check the context. They are most likely trying to convince their audience of a) their position, b) their intelligence, or c) their import. Further, if you take their sentence and put in ‘use’ instead of ‘utilize’, you will find that not one iota of meaning has been lost.

Let us compare this to another pair of words: ‘end’ and ‘terminate’. Like the set in our example, they are synonyms. However, there is an important difference. Compare the following:

“My job was terminated today.”
“My work day terminated at 4:30 today.”

The word ‘terminate’ has a sense of finality to it that is not present in ‘end’. In our first sentence, ‘terminate’ conveys that the speaker was fired, that their job is no more. It is a valid use of a large word.
The second sentence doesn’t sound right, though, as the speaker is merely speaking of what time they finished their job that day. This conflicts with the extra meaning associated with ‘terminate’. As the message doesn’t contain the extra meaning, it is an incorrect application of the larger word.

Every single sentence made with the word ‘utilize’ is like the second sentence with ‘terminate’. With ‘utilize’, there is no extra tone, meaning, connotation, implication, or denotation associated with it whatever. It adds exactly nothing to the sentence. It does, however, try to impress people as if it was doing something more than a vast amount of nothing. For this pompous deceit, the word ‘utilize’ ought to be mocked, scorned, and, eventually, obliterated.

Now that we’ve discarded the fluff, lets look at some plain erroneous word uses. Our first two examples come from advertising. What? Advertising being misleading? A shock, I know. But in these two words, they’ve actually penetrated the culture and infected our language.

The first of these is ‘organic’. I’m sure you are all aware of the ‘organic’ craze that grips western society. I’m not writing today about the pros and cons of foods not treated with chemicals. This is about words, and ‘organic’ is not the right one in this case. If I was a carrot vendor, I could label them organic, regardless of their growing conditions, and I would be in the right. Why? Because ALL carrots are organic. There is no such thing as an inorganic carrot. Mentioning that a carrot is organic is like mentioning that a dog is a mammal. It is redundant as every member of the former class, by definition, is a member of the latter class.

‘But wait!’ I hear you cry, ‘organic means something else now!’
No, it doesn’t. Marketers have said it does and people believed them.
Check any high school biology text. Organic still means ‘pertaining to carbon based chemical compounds(i.e. stuff that’s alive)’. And as carrots are carbon based plant life forms, they MUST be organic, regardless of chemical treatments.

Closely related is the label ‘natural’. A vendor of absolutely anything can call their product ‘natural’ as it means ‘something that occurs in the universe’ or, in other words ‘something that exists’. Zombies are unnatural. Round squares are unnatural. Teflon, on the other hand, is natural.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at another example.
Are birds natural? Of course they are. Well, how about birds’ nests? Sure, those are natural too. Why? Because a natural entity(bird) modified its natural environment(twigs), so the result(nest) must be natural.
The common misapplication of the word ‘natural’ stems from humans’ horrible habit of forgetting that they are animals i.e natural entities.

YOU! Reading this right now! You are an organism, of the mammalian variety, specifically the species homo sapien.

Given that, we can plug Teflon back into our earlier example. A natural entity (human) modified its natural environment (raw materials), so the result(Teflon) must be natural.
Or, conversely, if Teflon was actually ‘unnatural’ it couldn’t exist in the universe, but as it does, it must be natural.

Last (and admittedly least) I take issue with the current scientific use of the word ‘space’ to describe the stuff that makes up the universe which bends as per Einstein’s theory. To highlight why, I will present a dialogue.
Imagine yourself as part of a single-celled organism in the ocean. You are a lysosome (you digest food for the cell) and you are chatting with the leading scientist lysosome, Amanda, and she is very excited.

“You know how we call areas in the cell with nothing in it ‘space’?” she asks.
“Of course. Space means emptiness, so where there is no stuff, it must be ‘space’,” you reply.
“Exactly so!” returns Amanda, “but what if there was stuff in that area?”
“Well, it would cease to be ‘space’, I suppose.”
“Yes yes! That is indeed the very nature of my latest discovery. At the very edge of what we used to call space there is barrier called ‘the cellular membrane’. If this gets punctured, “space” flows out of the cell!”
“But wait, space cannot flow out, for it is emptiness. There is nothing to flow.”
“That’s the whole point. What is in between you and I is NOT space. We just perceive it as emptiness as we can traverse it with ease. But, as I said, if the membrane is breached, this medium that we travel through, which I just now named ‘cytoplasm’, flows out into real ‘Space’!”
“Amazing!” you exclaim, “True emptiness, ‘Space’ is outside the membrane!”
and you part ways contemplating this shift in world view.
A day passes.
Amanda comes to you again, this time even more excited.
“Remember how I told you of how our cytoplasm can flow out into space yesterday?” she asks.
“Certainly, I have thought of little else,” you reply.
“I have made some fantastic discoveries about the space outside the cell. It turns out that ‘space’ moves in things called ‘currents’ and can have varying temperatures!”
“I am confused. How can emptiness move? There is nothing to move.”
“That’s what is so revolutionary. Space, it turns out, is not nothing.”
“Of course it is, that is what space means.”
“But what of currents? If it is moving, space cannot be nothing”
“Surely your discovery of currents is the same as your discovery of cytoplasm, and merely indicates that space is something beyond what we previously thought of as space.”
“Absolutely not. Space goes on well beyond our capabilities to detect anything. Indeed, it may go out infinitely. And even if it didn’t, given our current understanding of physics, it would be impossible to determine what would be outside of it. Thus, it MUST be the ultimate space.
Some theories postulate a multi-space continuum, where ours is the Atlantic space and in a parallel existence there is something called the Pacific space. But, as I said, we can’t know, as we are bound by our space.”
“Wow!” you answer, “To think that all along, space was actually something!”

While that dialogue stews in your brain a moment, consider the notion of ‘elements’. They are basic building blocks out of which all matter is created. It used to be thought that water and air were elements. When it was discovered that they were made up of smaller bits, did they retain their status as elements? Did the definition of ‘element’ change to ‘bundle of 2 or more electron-cloud-covered-nuclei’? No, they did not, because it no longer made sense to describe them as ‘basic building blocks’. Instead, atoms replaced air and water as what actually counts as an element.

By the same token, if can be bent, it does not make sense to call it ‘space’, for space has nothing to bend. So what should we call the fabric that holds the existence of our universe, if not space?
How the hell should I know? I’m no namer. The best I can come up with is ‘Cosmoplasm’. I probably broke my own rules there, but I would expect people in the know to correct me and come up with a label that actually works. And what actually constitutes Space? My guess is the area outside of our universe. You know, where nothing exists. Unless, of course, that area is eventually discovered to have physical properties….

Words are powerful things and they deserve proper respect. Consider meanings and contexts, question it when marketers try to tell you that you can ‘buy one and get one “free”‘, and please, choose your words carefully.