It’s an ugly word for an ugly state of affairs. Surely English can do better. How about ‘descalate’?

Barack Obama, when asked about the situation in Ukraine this week, said: “We may be able to de-escalate it.” A number of news organisations reporting the president’s statement, among them USA Today and the Washington Examiner, chose to put quotation marks around de-escalate. But Obama didn’t, as far as I’m aware, make a bunny-ears sign when he said it. Why the squeamishness?

The word, after all, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and has also crossed the lips of John Kerry and Ban Ki-Moon. It’s been co-opted by the medical world, so that researchers now talk of “the de-escalation of nosocomial infections”. It’s fairly clear what it’s getting at: situations, tensions and crises have a tendency to escalate; de-escalation simply describes the reverse process. And yet it still hasn’t gained widespread acceptance.

To understand why, let’s take a look at the word’s short but colourful history. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, the winner of the first prize was a wooden moving staircase designed by the American inventor Charles Seeberger. Seeberger called his brainchild an “Escalator”, combining, he explained, the Latin word for steps or ladder (scala) with the word elevator. (The capital letter was, at first, a legal requirement: Seeberger trademarked the word. However, in 1950 the US Patent Office ruled that it had become a common descriptive term for moving stairways and no longer required a big E.)

These mechanical marvels (as refined and mass-produced by the lift manufacturing company Otis) were a hit with the public, and by 1922 the word escalate, meaning “to climb or reach by means of an escalator”, had entered the language.

It wasn’t long before the word took on a secondary, figurative use. The first use in print of escalate in the sense of “to increase or develop in stages” – specifically, “to develop from conventional warfare into nuclear warfare” – occurred in the (then Manchester) Guardian in 1959. It was only another five years before de-escalate, in the sense in which Obama used it, was born. The neologism was not without precedent: other de- words coined in the 20th century include decertify (1918), decaffeinate (1927), de-emphasise (1938), debrief (1942) and deregulate (1964). Most of these have been happily adopted throughout the English-speaking world. Why not de-escalate?

One problem may be inconsistency. Escalate, in its figurative sense, is most often used intransitively, ie without an object: “The situation in Gaza is escalating.” De-escalate, meanwhile, is generally a transitive verb: “The United States of America would prefer to see this de-escalated.” It’s true that escalate is sometimes used transitively (like the widely detested business use of grow, as in “how to grow your customer base”), and de-escalate sometimes intransitively, but as a rule, the agents are different: situations escalate, people de-escalate situations.

Similarly, while escalate has overtones of incrementality – note: “to increase or develop in stages” – de-escalation has no such limitations. Frankly, the quicker something de-escalates, the better. The words aren’t true opposites.

Secondly, there’s a feeling that there must be a better word out there. When you try to bring an object to a halt, are you de-accelerating it? If someone bullies you, are you, as a consequence, de-happified? The fact that de-escalate is for the most part used only by politicians and academics, who are rarely feted for the transparency of their language, suggests the majority of us still don’t trust it. Throw in that hideous hyphen, and you have one of the clunkiest coinages of the modern era, giving staycation, webinar and even vlog a run for their money.

Personally, I think the rich and mighty English language – a language that has produced such succulent offerings as lullaby, truculent, slugabed, spatchcock and blatherskite – can do better than a word that sounds like a mop sliding listlessly across a bathroom floor into a bucket.

But as one must in matters linguistic, I yield to mob rule. What do you think? Is de-escalate a perfectly upstanding English word? Is there another existing word that we should use instead (calm down, reduce, defuse, normalise)? Or do you have any suggestions for an entirely new word to take its place? A “re-” word, rather than a “de-” word, perhaps, because it’s about returning to a habitual state of affairs? Would “descalate”, modelled on decelerate, be more acceptable? Or what about … “to kerrymander”? Or “to blair”?

Andy Bodle is a journalist and scriptwriter who blogs at www.womanology.co.uk.

Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://ift.tt/1nmZmaw