I Ain’t Your “Bro”

Written by William Urbanski.

All the “bros” and “holla-back” girls gotta know that “incentivizing” the following words is “unacceptable.”

Every year, Webster’s Dictionary includes a few new words, officially recognizing them as part of the English language. Some of these, like buzzy or gig economy, make quite a bit a sense, while others such as go-cup are just ridiculous. The bookworms over at Webster’s seem to have forgotten the first half of the old adage “out with the old and in with the new,” which means it is up to me to propose my picks for words and terms that are so misused and overused that they should forever be struck down from the English language and the common consciousness.

Bro – There exists considerable confusion and, quite frankly, willful blindness surrounding the appropriate context in which to use this word. Derived from the word “brother,” it is often and ineffectively used in an attempt to make one’s English sound more colloquial.

Bro is a quite questionable word for anyone to use, but it is especially problematic for EFL speakers for a number of reasons. First of all, it is one of the more context-dependent words that I am aware of. Generally, when used between native speakers, there is an understanding that its use is purposefully ironic, harkening back to one summer in the 1980s when the word was part of the common vernacular. Second, bro is a clear example of a word belonging to a sociolect; that is, it identifies an individual as a member of a certain group. Are most EFL learners seventeen-year-old surfers from California? I do not think so. Last and most importantly, bro implies a very high level of social familiarity, which causes further problems for speakers of languages like Korean (and many European languages, for that matter) where things like social status and age are coded into language use. So, how could a non-native speaker reasonably be expected to deduce if he is socially close enough to someone to warrant calling him bro?

To be fair, I am not completely opposed to the locution itself, as long as it is used as a prefix and not a standalone word. Bromance? Fine. Are you a scientist conducting an experiment using bromide? Fair game. Do you like movies starting Josh Brolin? Me, too. But for crying out loud, please stop calling me “bro” the second time we have met. “Bud,” “buddy,” “homeslice,” and “man”: These are all viable and perfectly innocuous alternatives to the term “bro.” In conclusion, if you see me on the street, please remember that I ain’t your “bro.”

Incentivize– I feel conflicted about this word because it actually sounds pretty cool. As well, I used to employ this word on occasion before reading the book “What Money Can’t Buy” by Michael J. Sandel. Sandel explains that the problem with incentivize is that it is actually an economic term that has been misappropriated into other spheres of life. The word has a rich and storied history dating back to the earliest works of Maynard Keynes, the father of modern-day economics, in the 1950s, from which point its usage has only increased.

In economic terms, an incentive is a reward (usually financial) that promotes a certain behavior. In essence, it means that the more you pay someone, they more they will work. Here is an example: Let’s suppose a person gets 500 won for each piece of gum they scrape off the sidewalk. If one day the payment goes up to 5000 won per piece, it is reasonable to expect that more people will be willing to perform this unfulfilling job. On the surface, this idea makes a lot of sense, and one could be forgiven for assuming that paying people will result in more people performing any activity or unpleasant task. Alas, this is where economic theory diverges from reality. In “What Money Can’t Buy,” Sandel explains how Switzerland, which heavily relies on nuclear power, needed a place to store nuclear waste. Naturally, few people would welcome a nuclear waste site in their neighborhood, yet the residents of certain suitable areas were willing to accept the sites as part of their civic duty. After all, they and all their fellow countrymen were the beneficiaries of nuclear power. Economists, who wanted to study the impact of financial incentives on the number of people welcoming the sites, spoke to these residents. Even when offered substantial amounts of money, the number of people willing to accept the sites actually decreased!

This happened because there are certain things we, as members of society, do because they are either societal norms or they are just the right things to do. Nobody pays us to do these things, but if someone did, it would “crowd out” our sense of civic responsibility and result in us doing them less, not more. As well, countless experiments have shown that paying people to lose weight, stop smoking, or read more books is effective at the start, but as soon as the payments stop, people revert to their old behaviors. In this sense, certain activities are immune and even resistant to rewards! Most people are probably unaware of the denotation and increasingly complex connotations of the word “incentivize,” so here is a little trick to help you remember: Just do not use it.

Unacceptable – This word has just gotta go. No other word in the English language reeks of self-aggrandizing arrogance as this one. To even utter this nonsense, mishmash of letters when referring to someone’s behavior is a clear sign of stupidity. When someone says that something is “unacceptable,” it is clear that he or she has no linguistic aptitude or the ability to parse even the simplest of ideas or concepts. Using this judgemental and emotionally charged word requires two erroneous presuppositions: First, that the speaker is in a superior enough position to make a condemnation; and second, that others care what he or she thinks.

The only fathomable correct usage of this terrible word is when it refers to an object that does not fit into a physical space. If by some cruel twist of fate, this word were to remain in the English language, an imagined proper use of the term would be along the lines of “The can was too big to fit into the trash receptacle. The can was unacceptable.”

The other thing that drives me absolutely up the wall with this word is that it sounds so stuffy and makes the speaker sound so self-important when there are so many awesome-sounding alternatives: horrendous, atrocious, gnarly, egregious, and lousy, just to name a few. Even the very formal and technical-sounding suboptimal spares the speaker from sounding like a sanctimonious harridan.

Holla-Back Girl(HBG) – The female equivalent of bro has all the stigma of its male counterpart with none of the concision. When all you ladies out there are “raising the roof” at the club and grab the DJ’s microphone so that you can “shout out” and “give mad props” to your HBGs, you sound ridiculous. Please just stop using this term.

So those are my choices of words that have not stood the test of time and need to be summarily eschewed from the English language. There are a few other words that I think push the limits of uselessness, such as proactive and inappropriate, but that is an issue for another article. Until then, I would like to leave you with a quote from Mr. Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

THE AUTHOR

William Urbanski, managing editor of the Gwangju News, has an MA in international relations and cultural diplomacy. His preferred appellative is not bro. Instagram: @will_il_gatto