a miserable word? (Uh oh)

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

Uh oh. Unless I'm misreading the response below, it answers Ron Butter's question with an insult. But the question about what constitutes a "miserable" word is a very legitimate one. Indeed, someone campaigning against alleged laxness in language should welcome the opportunity to clarify a term of his that is called into question. 
 
    I've done considerable work on the term "shyster." Now *there's* a miserable word if there ever was one: highly insulting and deriving  ultimately from the German vulgar word for excrement (via British criminal slang).  And yet, if the word were magically removed from the English language today, our language would be the poorer for it. 
 
     So the questions remain: Does a scale of goodness or badness exist for the individual words in a language? How does one decide the degree of goodness or badness of any given term? And absent objective criteria in this regard, should the opinion of any one individual on the subject carry more weight than that of anyone else?
 
Gerald Cohen
 
   -----Original Message----- 
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Robert Hartwell Fiske 
Sent: Tue 12/9/2003 11:23 AM 
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
Cc: 
Subject: Re: a miserable word?

Say, Ron, could you more easily understand what a miserable mind is? Perhaps
so.


Robert Hartwell Fiske
Editor and Publisher
The Vocabula Review
www.vocabula.com
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