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Q&A Is there any popular wisdom on the word "seem"?

Many people have a personal animus against particular words. "Very" is a very common target. (See what I did there?) Certain words just seem inadequate to their task, flabby, somehow, or inapt. I...

posted 4y ago by Mark Baker‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Mark Baker‭ · 2020-04-05T12:50:56Z (over 4 years ago)
Many people have a personal animus against particular words. "Very" is a very common target. (See what I did there?) Certain words just seem inadequate to their task, flabby, somehow, or inapt. 

I don't think that this has to do with the weakness of particular words. It may have to do with the careless overuse of those words, or their frequently being used where another word would be more apt. 

But I suspect that it is actually a manifestation of a more general dissatisfaction with language. Language is a marvelous instrument, but it has many limitations. There are so many things we don't have words for. Trying to describe the taste of food, for example, is virtually impossible. Why is this. Why not just make up a word for the things there are no words for? It ought to be easy but it's not. And it is hard to understand why that is. 

The answer may be that there are many experiences that are simply not vocalizable. They can be evoked, if they can be evoked at all, not by words but only by stories. But telling evocative stories is difficult. We try to avoid it by relying on simple words, and the simple words are not there. And so langage frustrates us. And I think we take that frustration out on particular words, the ones that seem to fail us most often, perhaps because they are the words closest to what we want to say, but don't quite get the job done. 

It is, of course, a common pattern of human behavior to take out generalized frustration on particular objects, and for this to sometimes manifest itself as the social scapegoating of some hapless innocent, like "very" or "seems".