Apathy Sketchpad

Today, in the course of another internet argument about smoking, someone (really) decided to suggest that smoking was perhaps not that dangerous or addictive — although to put this into context, their chosen avatar was a picture of Gollum from the Lord Of The Rings films, which I found pleasingly ironic. They suggested that smokers were being treated differently to people with different, equally bad vices, and their argument was that “there is no ’safe’ level of obesity”. Well, that’s as maybe, but there’s a safe level of eating food.

Anyway, the point is that I said, “yes, there’s no safe level of obesity, where obesity is defined as being unhealthily overweight”, to which someone replied that strictly the definition of “obese” is “having a BMI above 30″. Well I say screw that. I’m heartily sick of politicians and the media redefining words like this. I think it happens when a scientist hands them a report which chooses to define these words in these ways for the sake of readability, and then politicians read out a conclusion like say “x% of people are obese” without letting anyone know what the word “obese” actually means in this context, and the media publish reports that say “four pints is now a binge”, which is useful of them as it allows them to use the phrase “binge drinking” to refer to any decent night out. But scientists are always doing that: when a physics question says “smooth” it means “assumed-frictionless”; when it says “long” it means “assumed-infinite”, and so on; when Richard Dawkins says “wants” he means “is likely to act as if it wants”; when a physicist says “in general” he means “absolutely always“. But we don’t insist on using those meanings outside science, because that just confuses people. So we won’t mind if you use the word “theory” to describe a hypothesis (provided you don’t then apply it to the Theory of Evolution), and we won’t be upset if you use the phrase “quantum leap” to describe a very large change. (We will tell you off if you use “light years” as a unit of time, though, because that’s just plain wrong.)

And, no, four pints is not a binge, obesity can’t be determined by BMI alone, and any other specialist jargon you may know that just happens to share a name, pronunciation, and etymology with another, more common, word is just that: specialist jargon. In real, everyday life, words mean what people understand by them in the context that you use them*, and what a tiny number of specialists might use them to mean is irrelevant.

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*Although, I do think that where the majority of people misuse a word, we should at least try to correct them before we give up and redefine the word itself. Often there’s an existing word that means what they want to say and no convenient synonym for the one they’re misusing.