The Guardian recently published an article about the verb ‘de-escalate,’ tracing its short history and arguing that it is an ugly and perhaps unnecessary coinage. http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/mar/07/obama-de-escalate-mind-your-language The article generated a long list of readers’ comments, many of them proposing alternative words and paraphrases, none of which, to my mind, adequately express the same idea.

Words come into existence and persist—even ugly ones—because there is no other way of concisely and precisely conveying a specific intended meaning, or what I like to call ‘emotional flavor’. There is therefore no such thing as an exact synonym.

Neither is language-change a beauty contest. Words fall in line with pre-existing phonotactic patterns or break with them and there is always a good reason for their creation. Once they become established they add to the beauty of the structure as a whole.

I was not aware before reading this article that the verb ‘escalate’ post-dates the neologism ‘escalator’ and the technology of the ‘moving staircase’. However, the Guardian article overlooks a possibly essential component of the semantic flavor of this word.

‘Escalation’ is not just about moving up in steps or stages—there are other words for that… ‘Ratchet up” for example. The overriding implication of escalation is that each step leads irrevocably upwards, like an escalator, and, by figurative extension, to a more serious state of affairs… This explains why the verb is generally used transitively.

It is these connotations of a slow staggered but irreversible process that make its supposed opposite, ‘de-escalate’ appear somewhat problematical… It could be reasonably argued that the term is a technical one, primarily used by diplomats and politicians to dissimulate in situations where an undesirable but irreversible process is underway. I cannot really imagine anyone talking about escalation or de-escalation, other than mockingly, in the discourse of everyday life. So ‘de-escalation’ would seem to be a diplomatic subterfuge for grudging acceptance of facts created on the ground, combined with a commitment to forestall further developments in the same direction.

Escalate and de-escalate are not therefore exact antonyms. But, then, pure antonyms are just as mythical as perfect synonyms. Lovers of symmetry and those wedded to a binary view of language may hate this, but I feel that, in this somewhat truncated, and limited sense, ‘de-escalate’ is here to stay.

All of this raises many questions that far from being quibbles or issues of a purely ‘academic’ nature—providing fodder for pedants and grammar nerds—are essential for understanding any language and the English language in particular.

First, it is clear that exact synonyms do not exist and the dissymmetry between escalation and de-escalation suggests that precise antonyms are equally mythical beasts.

Furthermore, words cannot even really be defined, at least not the way mathematical concepts are. They are living beings that it is impossible to pin down without killing them. This raises the possibility—horrific to some–that the basic premise on which lexicography rests may be wrong, or, at best, highly equivocal. I like to think of the relation between signifiers and signifieds in terms of an historically- and ultimately emotionally-determined collective landscape or ecology of meaning rather than some kind of extraterrestrial GPS mapping of a synchronic status quo. Descriptivism and prescriptivism alike are guilty of perpetuating this misconception.

The third point that this little etymological investigation raises is that historical developments and technological change are the main driving force behind language-change. Without these, language cannot adapt and the potential for adaptation is the mainspring of language itself. The English language is the lingua franca of the modern world, not because it is especially logical or easy to learn—it is essential I would argue that any language be able to defy logic–but merely because it was in English-speaking nations that the industrial revolution first occurred, eventually enabling the production of escalators and nuclear warheads.

More specifically, an essential defining feature of the way the capitalist mode of production has shaped English in a unique fashion is the need to express the systems of processes and procedures, steps and stages on which industry depends. It is impossible to understand the English language at any level—lexical, syntactic or even phonetic—without reference to this overwhelming determining factor. English is the language of industry par excellence, and it is to this and this alone that it owes its global prestige.