When "contact" was contemptible
The verb form was considered "grotesque" and "a fad word" as late as the 1960s.
I’ve just finished listening to Episode 945 of the hugely popular Grammar Girl1 podcast, in which host Mignon Fogarty interviews lexicographer and editor Steve Kleinedler, author of Is English Changing? Kleinedler is the former editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, where he presided over the Usage Panel, a variable and venerable group of writers and linguists who answered periodic surveys about words and language. The Usage Panel was, alas, disbanded in 2018—you can read about it in Stan Carey’s informative blog post from that year—but its influence survives in online language polls.
Mignon Fogarty had teased the episode earlier this week with just such a poll, posted on her LinkedIn2 page.
The verb to contact may be “fine” today—scroll down for Fogarty’s comments on those results—but for a long time it was anything but. It may astonish you to learn that as recently as 1969, only 34 percent of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel considered to contact “acceptable” in edited writing.
The percentage was new to me, but not the sentiment.
I first wrote about the history of to contact back in 2012, when I heard it used to mean “communicate with” in an episode of “Downton Abbey” set in 1918. To call it an anachronism was to grossly understate the matter: Although contact had been used as a verb since 1834, it could mean only “to place in a such a manner that surfaces are touching.” The “communicate” sense was first recorded in 1927—nine years after that “Downton Abbey” scenario—as an American colloquialism. When it reached the U.K. it was considered scandalous. Eric Partridge, in the 1947 edition of Usage and Abusage, dismissed it as sales jargon. A lot of Americans disapproved, too: In The Careful Writer, originally published in 1965, Theodore Bernstein dismissed contact as “a fad word.” Wilson Follett devoted two columns to contact in Modern American Usage (1966), tsk-tsking about kids these days: “If in doubt, contact your physician — this locution is as natural to the American of thirty as it is grotesque to the American of sixty, for whom the idea of surfaces touching is the essence of contact.”
H.L. Mencken, in The American Language, took a more measured view. (I’m looking at the 1977 paperback edition, but since Mencken died in 1956, I’m guessing this entry was originally published in the 1949 edition.) Writing about new verbs, he noted that contact was “one of these newcomers destined to stick. . . . “It apparently made relatively slow progress at the start, but after a couple of years it was in almost general use.” Its reception in England was “hostile,” Mencken wrote, except among members of the military services—always fertile soil for neologisms (and acronyms). There was just “no precise one-word substitute for it,” lamented a writer for the Cheshire Observer in 1941.
The gradual acceptance of to contact was reflected in American Heritage Usage Panel surveys. Although only a third found the usage “acceptable” in 1969, by 1998 that number had risen to 65 percent. And in 2004, 94 percent voted in favor. Who, I wonder, was among the 6 percent?
Mignon Fogarty provides some clues in the LinkedIn post in which she discusses the results of her own poll—and the comments readers posted:
What was most interesting and new to me was that the argument wasn't just about "verbing nouns," but also about "contact" being too vague. People argued you should say someone "called," "wrote," or "told" someone else something. (And I noticed some of your comments speculating that maybe the sentence used "contacted" because the writer didn't know how the Naval Intelligence Service communicated with the FBI.)
Part of me wonders if the increase in the number of ways we have to communicate helped drive the acceptance of "contact" as a verb. Now we can also fax, text, and message. Acceptance has been gradual, however, so if all these new ways to communicate were part of what led to greater acceptance, it was probably only a small part.
As of this writing, there’s a single comment on this post, from Jen H., who writes of to contact: “It beats ‘reach out’—ugh!” That’s right: If you’re looking for a new “grotesque” “fad word” unworthy of general acceptance, just reach out to reach out.
Yep, it’s another “girl” brand! I have met Mignon Fogarty and can confirm that she is a grown-up woman, but there’s no denying the appeal of alliteration..