Nomenclature Nowadays

 

nomenclature - noun - a term or terms applied to someone or something (Google).

I am convinced that we are living in an age of rapid alternations to language. New neologisms and nomenclature abound, making it nearly impossible to keep up, particularly if you are over sixty. 

I first noticed a few changes in the early 2000s when I was teaching language arts, a.k.a. English, in a middle school here in Jersey. Seemingly, the terminology migrated from comprehensible to abstruse overnight, particularly in the field of special education. Being that I had a number of "classified" students in my classroom, I had to be especially aware of their individual needs by law. Ostensibly, there were so many labels available as there were so many distinctive cases that numbers and initials started to spring up left and right like weeds on a baseball diamond. One that I pulled up time and time again was the "504," meaning that the student did not belong under the nomenclature of Special Ed but owned a few idiosyncrasies (i.e. learning disabilities) to warrant accommodations, such as more time in testing situations. Another esoteric emblem was the IEP, a lengthy document including the special ed student's learning maladies and recommendations for modifications. If you aren't in education, even by now, you are probably exhausted. Exactly. 

The other night, one of my friends, who just happens to be a reality TV personality, and his wife, a very close friend of mine from high school and college, joined my daughter and me for dinner. Two of the sundry topics of conversation were neologisms and nomenclature. My daughter introduced "cuffed" as a current synonym for what my generation used to call "going steady," or just being polymorphously perverse with one person of either sex for a period of a few months (serial monogamy). We three seniors got a kick out of "cuffed," probably because it made us think of another, older tag, S&M. But let's not go there and say we did. 

For whatever reason, because of the recent yet constant evolution of the English language, linguistics will always be a dynamic field of study. Fortunately, if you associate with young people, you won't have to enroll in a college class or do much internet research into the recent adjustments and additions to the vocabulary because you'll be in the presence of experts who are more than happy to share what they know. Personally, though, I'd rather speak softly and carry a big stick than have to use some of the nomenclature nowadays :).

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