Actuality Stars and Basketball Gamers and Ariana Grande Can’t Cease Saying It. The place Did This Phrase Come From?

“I simply have this, like, easy comfortability with him that, like, I simply love,” a lady named Madison cooed on the most recent season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind.

There are lots of causes to be confused and repelled by this assertion: For one factor, it was mentioned by means of a wall, as a result of that’s how this particular dating reality show works. Neglect about that for a second, and likewise attempt to put apart any emotions you might have about how individuals use the phrase like. That leaves us with comfortability, a phrase that many individuals insist isn’t a phrase in any respect. The person Madison was speaking to, Mason, didn’t appear to thoughts—“I really feel the identical with you,” he mentioned again—however some viewers at residence took discover. On Reddit, one user said that if yet another particular person on the present mentioned comfortability, they might slap them: “That’s not a phrase!!!”

I can relate. Someday within the final 12 months or so, comfortability zoomed previous “I resonate with that” to the highest of my checklist of linguistic pet peeves. I took be aware when Ariana Grande used my least favourite phrase in December, telling a French journalist, “I believe, in at the moment’s society, there’s a comfortability that we shouldn’t have, in any respect, commenting on others’ appears to be like.” It’s far and wide in sports activities, too, the place a headline may discuss a quarterback’s comfortability with his team’s playbook, or use it in reference to how a basketball player’s season is going. I hear it on TikTok and in podcasts too, however in reality the place I discover it greater than anyplace else is on the lips of Madison and Mason’s compatriots on actuality tv. As in: “Marcus and I simply have this connection and this pure comfortability to us,” The Bachelorette’s Jenn Tran mentioned final summer season. I’m not the one one to have picked up on this: In a December Vulture recap of an episode of yet another reality show, The Ultimatum, author Laura Bradley commented that comfortability has change into “inescapable” within the dating-show sphere.

However every kind of dumb issues get mentioned on actuality TV. What’s so uncomfortable about this locution particularly, to me and, it seems, plenty of others?

“It looks like such a ridiculous phrase to me,” mentioned Dorian Stuber, an English professor at Hendrix School in Arkansas, who has seen the dreaded C-word cropping up in his college students’ writing over the previous 12 months. “I’m similar to, What is that this? Don’t we have already got a wonderfully good phrase which means this?” Stuber is referring to the phrase consolation, and it is a widespread knock on comfortability: that it provides pointless letters and syllables to a wonderfully good phrase to create a brand new phrase that clunkily means the very same factor as the unique one.

“It simply sounds ugly, is the first factor,” mentioned Ashley Fairbanks, a author and communications skilled in San Antonio. Fairbanks mentioned she was just lately horrified to listen to the phrase come out of her 13-year-old daughter’s mouth. “I undoubtedly corrected it fairly blatantly when she mentioned it, nearly like she swore or one thing,” she mentioned. “She informed me she didn’t care in any respect about my opinion, however I haven’t heard her say it once more.”

Perhaps you haven’t encountered the phrase in any respect—this may be particularly comprehensible for those who’re not a actuality TV watcher. Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks how widespread phrases and phrases are in books over time, exhibits that comfortability has seen a sharp increase over the past decade, but it surely’s nonetheless minuscule once you compare it to, say, comfort. Equally, Google Traits exhibits an uptick in searches over that point, however the numbers stay comparatively low.

So it’s not that it’s probably the most dominant language pattern—it’s extra that you just’d assume it was, the way in which it will get beneath phrase individuals’s pores and skin. “I don’t need to be the one that judges language use,” Stuber informed me. “However one thing about this phrase does sort of set me off just a little. And so I’m all in favour of that about myself.”

Whereas I can’t deny that it has felt to me like comfortability entered the lexicon out of nowhere over the previous couple of years, it has truly been round for much longer than that—tons of of years longer. For a latest radio segment for Michigan Public, College of Michigan professor Anne Curzan answered a listener who wrote in in regards to the rise of comfortability. After mentioning that comfortability sounds much less awkward out loud than it’d initially look, because of individuals collapsing a few of its syllables into “comf-tor-bil-i-ty,” Curzan defined that comfy initially comes from French and has had its present which means for the reason that 1700s. For nearly as lengthy, its noun kind has technically been comfortableness, which in Curzan’s view has a barely totally different which means than consolation. The place comfortability is available in can not less than partly be attributed to some bigger traits in suffix use over the previous couple of hundred years—suffix traits, who knew!—whereby -ness has been dropping out in recognition to -ity.

That explains why somebody may select comfortability over comfortableness—however not why they’d select it over consolation. Stuber mentioned he’s tried to be open to the concept that there’s a great reply to that. “The grumpy a part of me is like, Yeah, good day, we have already got a great phrase. After I’m being extra beneficiant, I’m considering, Nicely, possibly there may be some want that’s being addressed by the rise of this phrase.” He mentioned he raised the query along with his college students, who supplied blended opinions. “One factor some scholar mentioned to me was it’s a phrase they may use in writing as a result of it sounds fancy,” he mentioned. “Different college students had been the alternative. They had been like, ‘Oh my God, I’d by no means use it in a paper. I take advantage of it possibly if I’m speaking to buddies or one thing.’ ”

Adam Aleksic, a linguist who goes by @etymologynerd on TikTok and is the creator of the forthcoming guide Algospeak, wasn’t certain what individuals may be attempting to speak with comfortability, however its existence doesn’t trouble him. As for why somebody may use it over consolation and comfortableness, “I do assume it sort of has its personal vibe just a little bit,” he mentioned. He added that it’s hardly unprecedented for related clusters of phrases to exist: “Indentation and dent each imply the very same factor, however I’d use them in numerous conditions,” he mentioned. He additionally pointed to additional and extraneous, and instantaneous or instantaneous. “It’s very a lot a standard etymological factor that we typically add additional what are known as morphemes, or elements of a phrase, even once we don’t truly must, and so they don’t change a lot in regards to the phrase,” he mentioned.

If we take critically the concept that comfortability is filling a distinct segment, one which consolation can’t fill, what’s that area of interest? Nicole Holliday, a linguistics professor on the College of California, Berkeley, surmised that consolation is already doing rather a lot, as a phrase: It may be a noun, a verb, or an adjective, and folks may bypass it for that motive, racking their brains for a phrase that feels extra definitively like a noun. It made sense to her that individuals may need totally different phrases for, say, “the consolation of the 3-point line” versus “the consolation out of your cozy sweater.” Comfortability’s fixed use on actuality TV normally considerations relationships and connections, suggesting a distinction between emotional consolation and bodily consolation. However Fairbanks mentioned she additionally hears the phrase ceaselessly on TikTok Store, the place it’s used within the context of promoting garments, creating a wierd confluence between stretchy pants and emotions.

Perhaps it’s not all that shocking that comfortability has change into standard within the particular realms it has, actuality TV chief amongst them. Right now, “now we have extra entry to video of individuals talking casually” than we ever have earlier than, Aleksic identified, leading to a “wealth of casual language getting used day by day.” As Holliday put it, “There are all these people who want to speak about their emotions on TV. And they also’re simply noun-ing adjectives as a result of they’re speaking a lot. Identical factor on TikTok, and the identical factor with sports activities commentators. Announcers aren’t gonna go to the dictionary. Actuality TV stars aren’t gonna go to the dictionary. And so they shouldn’t, as a result of everyone knows what they imply.”

If we get the gist, why does comfortability nonetheless really feel to a few of us like a slow-motion tragedy, the next literally occurring earlier than our eyes? Why do some modifications of language strike us as clever and innovative and a few, like this one, as, nicely, dumb? Although it isn’t simply that it sounds dumb—plenty of issues sound dumb. I believe what actually offends us may be that it sounds dumb within the service of attempting to sound good. It all the time carries with it a whiff of bullshit.

To linguists, being bugged by comfortability isn’t any totally different or extra noble than being bugged by every other new phrase or language pattern. Finally, “individuals hate new phrases,” Holliday mentioned. “They hate language change, however they actually hate language change after they assume it’s coming from the underside up, versus the highest down, in society.” Listening to the phrase in such unsophisticated settings as actuality TV and social media may be making us that rather more judgmental.

Holliday added, “On this specific case, there’s no motive that it couldn’t have been comfortability 700 years in the past. That could possibly be the previous kind and the brand new kind could possibly be comfortableness. These items are considerably interchangeable when you find yourself attempting to noun an adjective, and so any kind of emotional attachment that any individual has to the previous kind versus the brand new kind can be solely as a result of it’s previous. There’s nothing linguistically actual there.”

Fellow haters, I do know that is onerous to listen to. If it’s any comfort, linguists aren’t certain whether or not comfortability will stick round. “We do see this 10- or 20-year enhance in comfortability,” however, Holliday mentioned, “it’s completely attainable that by 2030 no one’s ever saying it once more. What predicts that’s whether or not it develops a shade of which means totally different than comfortableness, which I’d argue that it appears to be creating.”

As for Stuber, the professor in Arkansas, he informed me he’s been listening to the phrase rather a lot since he introduced it up in school—largely as a result of his college students have been “relentlessly trolling” him with it: “I’ve acquired quite a lot of emails that use the phrase comfortability.” It’s finished nothing for his consolation.