Semantic Drift: "meaninglessness," "pointlessness"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Having taught a university course on "war and literature" for many semesters, I've noticed a strong tendency among many writers since the Vietnam era writing of "the meaninglessness" or "the pointlessness" of war.  Exx.:

  2004 Leslie Dunton-Downing and Alan Riding _Essential Shakespeare Handbook_ (London: Dorling Kindersley) 267: Pacifists conjecture that the play captures Shakepeare's personal views about the pointlessness of war.

  2005 Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shabdangal&diff=61171525&oldid=27270665  : The meaninglessness of war,...the beastliness of domestic squabbles in the name of religion and caste, the degradation hidden beneath the cloak of 'respectability',...all find space in this work of art.

  Professional writers and amateurs alike are fond of these phrases, which strike me as semantically odd: what they really mean is something like "unwisdom" or "folly."

  Specific wars may become "pointless" for governments or "meaningless" for individuals, but these words seem poorly applicable to war in the abstract.  Nations wage war to accomplish particular ends. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don't, but the existence of ends means the war has a point and a meaning.

  The title of Barbara Tuchman's book, _The March of Folly_, would be approaching the absurd if it were _The March of Pointlessness_.

  I suspect that "pointlessness" and "meaninglessness" have shifted because of the writers' misapprehension of the word "absurdity."

  Primarily since _Catch-22_ (1961), the literary-philosophical nuances of "absurd" and "absurdity" have been applied to a certain kind of war writing.  It's all too convenient to explain these words to freshmen reading Kafka, for example, as being synonymous with "point(meaning)less(ness)." But that's a simplification.  Nevertheless, my SWAG is that many unpracticed writers haven't mastered the distinction.

  Hence, "pointlessness," "meaninglessness" = folly.

  JL


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