By Rob Proctor
December/January 1995
DENVER, Colorado—It’s a fact of American life: as we become an increasingly complex society, our language must adapt to specialized interests. Sit down with a bunch of computer people and you’re unlikely to understand much of what they’re saying. Is a “RAM chip” a large new snack for which I need a “megabyte”? This new language—precise, direct, practical—can be annoying if one doesn’t speak it.
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Other occupations and activities have their own languages. A novice tennis player needs to expand his vocabulary to include “topspin”, “volley”, “drop shot”, “overhead smash”, and “Navratilova”. Learning the words is the easy part.
It’s a marvel that our language adapts to the way we live and enables us to communicate quickly and well. I am irritated when words are used to obstruct clear speech. I wish nightly, as I watch the news, that the weatherperson will forget to forecast “scattered thunderstorm activity” and simply say, “It’s going to rain.”
Part of our gardening language is simple. We all understand “dig”, “hole”, “sow”, “sprout”, “prune”, “clip”, “weed”, “mildew”, “fungus”, “rot”, and “die”. That’s why I react to the words “plant material” and “install” the way I do to fingernails on a chalkboard. Why complicate direct, vibrant words? Plants are not material, they are plants. Cotton shirts and hula skirts are made from plant material, not gardens. We don’t install plants; we plant them. A furnace is installed. We water them in case scattered thunderstorm activity does not occur. The only difference between “planting” and “installing plant material” is that the latter costs a lot more.
The other part of our gardening lingo is Latin. It doesn’t come easily to most of us, although some of my friends claim that in another life I was Emperor Nero. I don’t recall that he was noted for his gardening skills, but he spoke Latin, drank wine, fiddled around, and was a mentally unbalanced control freak. The similarity escapes me. Except for that one unfortunate microwave incident involving Polish sausage, I haven’t set so much as a block of Denver aflame.