A Symposium on Charm
Editor’s Note: As is always true in the case of our symposia, these contributions were written simultaneously and independently in response to the assigned topic. Any overlaps, parallels, or violent disagreements are therefore purely serendipitous.
AS A DYSLEXIC who’s also improbably a novelist and therefore always puzzling over, growing dissatisfied with, distrusting, parsing, misspelling, and frequently mincing words, I’m amused by words that shift round, reversing their field on one meaning in order to denote an opposite meaning. Cleave is the first example we all immediately think of. Sanction, left, resign are notable others we might’ve overlooked. Contro-nyms, these are called in dusty dictionary back rooms. Contronym is the word for words that mean one thing but also mean the opposite of that one thing. Belt. Dike. Flag. Contronym, itself, contrary to what we might hope, is not a contronym. Though it’d be a kind of justice if it were.
Charm has brought all this possible irrelevance to mind. Charm conventionally means something like “the power to give delight”; or, “arousing of admiration.” “The admiral strode into the hall and totally charmed all the junior officers’ wives.”
Ignore, if you will, the other definitions of charm that denote a trinket a high-school girl would once have worn on her wrist in the days before ubiquitous tattoos, and the antique notion of charm as designating “a confused sound of voices.” (I never heard of that one; it was just there in my big Random House.) In any case these uses are straight-forward sound-alikes/ spelled-alikes—homonyms—not words at war with themselves.
Charm lands in my sights because, while usually denoting delight (it does have such a lotion-y sound and pleasing appearance), it has now unlikably shifted via modern usage to signify almost the opposite of delight, thus sort of betraying itself. And me. I’m one of those readers who feels sore over the loss or demotion of a word. Gay….ugh; share….jeez; disinterest…. unforgivable. Though I’m not, I hope, one of these tiresome pseudo-purists who’s always sniping and pecking at people for using farther when they mean further. I’m more a conservationist. A bricklayer who prefers the sturdier, old-fashioned bricks. I’m against words becoming slurred when the result is a net loss of vital intelligence.
Recently I was writing a sports profile of the stalwart NFL gunslinger Peyton Manning. This was for a big sports magazine you’ve all probably heard of but almost certainly never read. In my profile I stated that one of Manning’s great, manly strengths was that in all phases of the game he was “plausible.” As a team leader, as player, as an off-the-field goombah. Don’t ask me why this adjective came to mind. Word choices just happen to me that way.
But upon reading, , that actually it meant unreliable, deceptive, and shifty. Was I surprised? Yes.
