Do you sense something problematic about the word “problematic”? The way it’s used has changed a great deal in recent years, so much that it can now seem a little shifty. The journey that brought us here, however, is less problematic than typical. The life story of “problematic” is an education on how words change over time.
Its root word, “problem,” would have mystified King Alfred. The closest Old English equivalent was a homely word that looked kind of like a cough: “þearf.” Geoffrey Chaucer knew “problem,” however: Middle English took it in from the French “problème,” losing the final e and the accent. But that wasn’t its true origin. The word traced all the way to the ancient Greek word “proballein,” meaning “to throw forward,” as in something put forth for analyzing. This first meaning of “problem” is the one we now use in “math problem” or “problem set.”
The meaning of “problem” we now think of most immediately, as something that troubles us or a sticky situation, evolved from that. A proposition put forward often calls for fashioning a solution to something noisome: We therefore have a problem in the “Houston, we have a problem” sense we’re all familiar with.
That kind of evolution is typical. (That kind of narrowing from general to specific is normal, too. “Audition” started as a fancy word for hearing, with the same root as “auditory.” Because assessing a performer’s suitability for a role often involves listening to the person speak or sing, “audition” narrowed to mean a tryout.)
“Problematics” was an even later arrival, but it harked back to the original sense of the root. When my fellow academics refer — as they started doing a great deal toward the end of the last century — to the problematics of a topic, they are listing not annoying things that need to be fixed but intriguing twists that deserve extended consideration. In the book “Problematics of Sociology,” for example, the sociologist Neil Smelser addressed issues of noted complexity in his field.
Even the fact that the word is “problematic” rather than “problematical” illustrates something about how words change: the role of serendipity, despite the appeal of regularity. The two words were both rare until about the 1970s. Today “problematic” is many times more common than its almost twin. In the same way, “exotic” long ago extinguished “exotical.” In other instances, the variant ending in “al” takes the prize: Today we recognize the word “heretic” as a noun. But it used to function as an adjective too, until “heretical” won out. You just never know. Sometimes one version takes on a different meaning altogether. “Fantastic” once meant “remote from reality,” but today we use “fantastical” for that meaning, while “fantastic” is the name of a bathroom cleanser and an exclamation meaning “great.” Meanwhile “fanatic” and “fanatical” just sit there side by side, persisting as alternatives of equivalent stature.
These days, the plural “problematics,” as wrinkle-browed exegesis of complex academic issues, is a marginal term. So is the straightforward sense of “problematic” meaning “full of problems,” as in “Sunflowers are problematic as a large-scale crop.” The word is in wide circulation, but its current incarnation is as a euphemism for a very specific kind of problem or a very specific kind of person.
Its newest usage is a way to say, without saying, that something is perpetuating a historic power imbalance — especially when it comes to race. An example is “Your fave is problematic,” a catchphrase that got around for a while starting in the 2010s as a way to call out fandom for people whose values are deemed to be incorrect. Fandom for the television host Trevor Noah earned this designation when a series of his old tweets, including coarse jokes about subjects such as “fat chicks,” surfaced in 2015. The most recent star deemed to be problematic was Patti LuPone, who in a recent New Yorker article referred with rather acrid dismissal to two Black stage stars.
It’s significant that this use of the word “problematic” does not explicitly state the problem. We are to intuit it. There is a kind of délicatesse in this, a way to circumvent the thorny national conversation about concepts such as intersectionality, wokeness and cancel culture. That impulse toward euphemism, too, is a natural part of language. And it is no less clear as a result.
This kind of evolution is not new, even if the words that result are. If President Calvin Coolidge was brought back to life, he would be baffled by “pizza,” for example, a food that was not widely eaten in America until after World War II. In the same way, “diverse” was in Coolidge’s day a synonym for “different.” Today it has essentially become a euphemism for Black, Latino, Native American and maybe Asian. To President Warren Harding, “problematic” might refer to something that needed to be fixed. To us, “problematic” might mean his infidelities to his wife.
As for the ancient Greeks, the transformation of a word that meant to propose something would surely have struck them as otherworldly. But then again, “nice” started out meaning “ignorant.” In any language, plus ça change … well, the more they change.
One last problem for consideration: You might imagine someone of Harding’s era would recognize the expression “no problem,” but it didn’t really come into circulation until the 1960s. Sometimes what seem like very ordinary words or expressions are recent coinages. My favorite example is “oink.” The first written “oink” is in 1910. Before that, a child who was asked what pigs say would probably answer either “squeak” or “wee-wee,” as in the little piggy that went “wee-wee-wee all the way home.” And if you think about it, “wee-wee” is closer to the sound of pigs than “oink.” Bring back “wee-wee”!
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
The post What’s So Problematic About ‘Problematic’? appeared first on New York Times.
