ON THE FIRST day of tumultuous 2020, a Serbian used the English language properly. Novak Djokovic told reporters that he had been saddened and moved – I’m paraphrasing – by the plights of Australians “affected” by bushfires.
Hallelujah!! More power to his forehand.
Call him Novak, and he alone, it seems, has survived the onslaught of those idiotic and lazy noun-verbalisers who use increasingly the rubbish word impacting.
Why are impacted and impacting everywhere, gabbled so constantly on radio, on TV, and in print? When the catastrophic fires were burning and reporters were under pressure to produce, there might have been a small excuse for their use.
But only a tiny one. What we in Australia have done is import more verbal laziness. From the United States.
Is it really so hard to learn to apply the difference between effect and affect?
The first is a noun, the name for something that happens following an action of some sort. The second, most importantly, is almost always a verb that describes the effect of a deed or thought on something else. The two are a verbal yin and yang, if you like. (There’s a second definition of affect. In philosophy and literature theory, it’s often used to denote an emotion.)
Some correct examples. “The effect of teasing supporters after a Bombers loss is often a punch in the mouth.” Or, “One effect of a shark bite is to lose a lot of blood”. “COVID-19 has affected (not impacted, you’ll notice) worldwide many scores of thousands of people”.
Impact is a noun. It can’t become a verb, yet people who should know better have bastardised it, promoting it to verbal service. (The curse of verbalised nouns has struck before. I’ll buy that Scott Pendlebury goaled. But gifting and gifted are creeping in. What happened to the verb to give?)
Honestly, I’ve had it with impacted and impacting. With its prevalence. With its wrongness. It matches the rampant multiple as a word of zero value. And it’s used because it seems to be a top-of-head, instant word. A Big Mac of language, something to fill a hole when you can’t bother to taste and think.
To do better—to use correctly affect and effect— means taking a second or so to decide which vowel is the right one for the circumstances, an a or an e. And many writers and commentators are proving far too lazy to do that.
Impacted has become a verb only recently, and most dictionaries fail to recognise its verbal use.
My Oxford English Dictionary of 1971 devotes less than a third of a column to impact and impacted. The latter means, “Pressed closely in, firmly fixed”. Some of you will have had molars that are too close and firmly fixed or impacted. The word has nothing to do with one thing affecting another.
Impact is a collision, the name the Oxford gives to “the striking of one body against another … ”, as it puts it. That’s what lazy people are writing and talking about when they’re having things impacting on other things. All through the media we’re being told that COVID-19 is colliding with economies. Hot days smashed into bushfires, bushfires crashed into houses and farms, and sightings of sharks—just sightings—bang into surfers fleeing waves. This sort of thing is rubbish writing. Thoughtless. Lazy.
Affected is the verb you need to use when something influences something else. Shark sightings affected the surfers, who fled the waves. COVID-19 is affecting (not impacting) economies. I don’t find the distinctions all that difficult, and with a little thought you won’t.
Let’s try to rid the world of impacted and impacting. They’re ugly and ridiculous, clown-words that don’t say what they’re supposed to.
A senior executive commenting recently on the weak literacy of many job-seekers should have known better. He said that errors in documents “negatively impact” productivity and teamwork. Negatively impact!! I died. If only he’d said “reduce”.