Zombie Nouns

Reading a book on improving your writing sounds tedious and boring. Not so – when the author is Harold Evans, and the book is Do I Make Myself Clear? Evans, a former editor of The Times of London, writes beautiful prose with a dollop of dry wit. His book has a varying cadence that keeps the reader engaged, the examples are exemplary, and it’s a joy to see a master craftsman at work. Language is his craft, and he wields it with sharpness. It reminds me of the biblical proverb: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

Reading Evans has made me scrutinize what I read and write. If my blog post two days ago “felt” different, I may have unconsciously imbibed lessons in his book. However, I feel I have a long way to go as a writer. I am also only halfway through his book, so I expect to discover (with horror) more examples that remind me of my inchoate writing. This past weekend I learned about zombie nouns, zoophagi orsum (flesh-eating “unnecessary words, pompous phrases and prepositional parasites”), and pleonasms. If I attempt to summarize or paraphrase Evans, I would do his writing a great injustice. The two pictures at the end of this post show his introduction to zombie nouns. If you enjoy his flavorful prose, I highly recommend getting his book and reading it in its entirety.

I leave you with three words that struck me in Evans’ list of words whose meanings are often botched.

One that I’ve used wrongly for years: Decimate. It means to kill one-in-ten. I’ve often used it to mean destroying ninety percent rather than ten percent. I should have known this. In class, I regularly have to remind students what a decimeter is.

One that I have never used, but J. K. Rowling has led me astray: Enervate. In Book 4, stunned characters are revived using the spell Ennervate. It sounds like Energy combined with Invigorate. The actual meaning of enervate is to weaken – the opposite of what you might think.

One that Rowling uses correctly, and I should have learned from her: Oblivious. I’ve used it synonymously with ignorance or clueless-ness. But that’s incorrect. It actually relates to forgetfulness. Evans writes: “If you are ignorant of something, nobody told you. If you are oblivious, somebody told you but you let it slip into oblivion.” How are memories erased in the Harry Potter world? The spell is, appropriately, Obliviate.