There are still the men’s curling finals to look forward to, but I have hardly got over a strange use of language in a commentary on the men’s ski-jumping.
There are still the men’s curling finals to look forward to, but I have hardly got over a strange use of language in a commentary on the men’s ski-jumping. ‘That’s a very prolific jump,’ said the excited commentator, more than once. I’m not such a stick in the mud, or snow, as to insist that the word prolific should only be used to mean ‘capable of producing offspring’. We have had childless but prolific authors since the middle of the 18th century. I do not even mind it being used to mean ‘abundant’. But it stretches it too far to use it as a synonym for ‘long’.
The new gymnastic sciences do seem to use words in a most surprising way. Last weekend I passed a gym advertising kinesis. By kinesis, the biologists mean ‘an undirected movement of an organism that occurs in response to a particular kind of stimulus’ — light, say, or chemicals. I doubt that is what was going on in the gym, though I did not dare enter and find out. If it was not merely a smart word for ‘moving about’, I suspect it was connected with a trade-marked term for gymnastic equipment.
In any case the word had quite different connotations from those of a related term popular among our forces in Afghanistan. ‘Military sources,’ reported Marie Colvin from Camp Bastion, ‘said special forces had been infiltrating the town on “kinetic” missions — jargon for armed attacks.’ Jargon it remains: in other words, common coin among the armed forces but unfamiliar to civilians. But if things go on as they have been, and occasional interviews are recorded with men on active service, then I suspect radio audiences will become familiar with it in its new sense. That might make the enterprises that have adopted the name Kinetic for bicycles, nightclubs and public relations outfits think again.
Kinetic has been such a feelgood word that Sainsbury’s gave it a run last summer when it announced devices in a supermarket car park called ‘kinetic road plates’, which were expected to produce enough energy when customers drove over them to power the checkouts in the shop. A physicist called Professor David McKay later wrote squashingly in the Guardian of cars driving over the plates producing only ‘one four-thousandth of the energy used by the trip to the supermarket’ — not enough to trouble about.
I do wonder, though, whether the military usage had an influence on the naming in 2001 of the defence technology company called QinetiQ, for all its fanciful capitals. Kinetic is a most prolific word.
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