Then I hearkened back to a Christmas letter I received in which I was struck by the use of the word “official.” Here is what that part of the letter said:
I never knew there was a point when one officially turned 5 1/2! But hey, if my friend is announcing the officialness of an official event, why can’t I?
I AM PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE GLOTTAL STOP IS OFFICIALLY OPEN!
YES! There we go - the answer to my how-to-start-my-blog question!
How interesting, though, that my friend used this word in reference to an event that I would never imagine would qualify for “official”-worthy status. Why was she saying this?
I think my friend's use of the word comes closest to this entry in the OED: "4.a. Derived from, or having the sanction of, persons in office; authorized or supported by a government, organization, etc.; hence (more widely) authoritative; formally accepted or agreed." But my friend is using this in a slightly different way - her use means something more like “truly” or “strictly speaking." Perhaps she has been telling people for the past few months that her son is 5 1/2, but now he truly has passed the date on the calendar that is exactly six months from his fifth birthday, so it’s “official.” This could give the impression that my friend generally fudges facts unless she qualifies them with an "official" declaration indicating that she is speaking with precision. A similar phenomenon is when people preface a statement with, "To tell you the truth," or, "To be honest with you," as Tim at Mother Tongue Annoyances notes. If you don't preface a sentence in this way, does it mean you aren't telling the truth? Is there a term for such qualifications that make speaking the truth a marked rather than an unmarked way of speaking?
It could have been, however, that my friend was looking for a word that would make her son’s five-and-a-half-ness seem a bigger deal. She could have just said, “___ has grown quite a bit in the past year and is now 5 1/2,” but that doesn't sound incredibly exciting. By framing the statement as an “announcement” and making her son’s age something “official”-worthy, she steps out of her Christmas-letter-writing voice and makes the statement into something that seems to carry more weight.
During the week in which I was mulling this over, another use of “official” appeared to me. At a wedding shop, I saw this T-shirt:
It’s a little hard to see in this picture, but it says “OFFICIAL RING BEARER” in a police-esque logo. The back says “RING SECURITY.” That made me think, isn’t it enough of an honor for a boy to be a ring bearer? Does such a T-shirt somehow help the chap (or his parents) to feel more important if it is made to seem that the wedding couple has selected him not as his friends or relatives, but as authorities holding some sort of office? Is there some sort of ring insecurity here?
A Google search of other uses of official shows that officialness is everywhere! Here are some more examples:
I think each of these could be analyzed in a way similar to how I looked at my friend’s letter and the ring bearer shirt, so I won’t talk about each individually. But how interesting that they all use the word “official” or “officially” to impart a sense of power.
So anyway, wow, I feel enlightened and empowered now - anything can be official! So instead of just officially declaring The Glottal Stop to be open, I declare the official food of The Glottal Stop to be borscht, the official drink of The Glottal Stop to be mango juice, and the official bird of The Glottal Stop to be the cockatoo!
1 comment:
You would choose the cockatoo, B!
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