Random

I had a random thought the other day about the random use of a random word causing random irritation in my life, so I made a random decision to put some random musings together in the form of a random blog. The word that spurred this action? RANDOM!

I am convinced that no one outside academia actually knows what the word means. As the "it" word of the moment, I hear it used plenty these days, largely as a synonym for words such as arbitrary, unrelated, unexpected and spontaneous (the most egregious misuse.) What I never hear is correct use of the word, other than by my colleagues discussing research methodology, a blessed sanctuary of correctness in an ill-defined world of misused randomness. I'll focus my treatise on the abuse of random in its adjectival form, used to describe an isolated event, since that's where much of the abuse occurs. We'll leave the application to people to another day.

Ya see, to be random, you generally have to be deliberate. And randomness involves multiple events. So no single occurence can ever be random on its own. It can be unexpected. It can be spontaneous. It can be arbitrary. It can be unique (and let's not get me started on people who try to qualify the uniqueness of an experience.) But it can never be random. Not something the average schnook seems to grasp, especially the late-teen set.

I've long conceded the English language, whether it be British or American (and the random use of random is endemic to both versions of the language) has begun to evolve in such a direction we'll sound more like Cher Horowitz than William F. Buckley in another generation. It's the product of language learned by contact, but not study or practice, and a certain reverse snobbery that makes unacceptable English de rigueur - a point of pride.

Proper use of English and a well-developed vocabulary seems to be something that frightens a great many people. The degree to which I'm accused of doing so for nefarious purposes, usually associated with intimidation or domination around here (generally by people who can't mount a decent argument, but that's another blog) is proof enough of that. The misuse of random is just the tip of the iceberg. We quantify discrete items in terms of amount, not number (the British got there first!), have deja vu all over again (the ultimate redundancy), should mourn the disappearance of the personal pronoun in favor of the generic that, and worse. And we never notice.

I despair for the precise, well-articulated sentence. It's becoming as extinct as the dodo. Instead, we are content to pepper our writing with text message-isms and misdefined words. Randomly.

And that, my friends, ends my random rant on random misuse of random. Comment on!