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Extolling the Perimeters of a Parameter

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She is more to be pitied than censured;

She is more to be helped than despised;

She is only a lassie who ventured

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Down life’s thorny path ill-advised.

Do not scorn her with words harsh and bitter;

Do not laugh at her shame and downfall.

For a moment, just stop and consider

That a man was the cause of it all.

I recalled that melodramatic old song while contemplating the pathetic picture of an innocent--indeed, an immaculate--word taken from sublime heights to a state of tattered ignominy among hoi polloi, simply by being embraced by ignorant lovers. Recently, I mentioned the word parameter, which has been misused to death in recent years.

I said that, strictly speaking, parameter is an expression from crystallography, about which I know nothing. The first parameter definition in my Webster’s New International, Third Edition, tells me that it is “the relative intercept made by a plane on a crystallographic axis, the ratio of the intercepts determining the position of the plane.”

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I feel sure that there are many thousands of perfectly sane people who know exactly what that means, but I’m not one of them. The second definition is from mathematics, about which I know so little that I couldn’t even begin to ask intelligent questions regarding what I don’t know. I think my last brush with mathematics--not counting checkbooks, taxes, and what-do-I-tip-on-this-tab--was in high school algebra, circa 1942. The mathematical definition of parameter begins, “an arbitrary constant characterizing by each of its particular values some particular member of a system . . . “ and I’m already way over my head. The succeeding definitions in WNI III are no more enlightening.

My WNI III was published in 1966. It must have been sometime after that, probably during the Nixon years, when an anonymous member of the booboisie discovered parameter , thought it was a nifty, high-class, state-of-the-art way to say perimeter and took the word to dinner parties, to bed, and introduced it to all his friends, happily misusing it for his own pleasure and the titillation of his social circle.

Its misuse achieved almost instant popularity and was accepted with overwhelming enthusiasm. It started appearing on talk shows and in political discourse, showing up in phrases such as the parameters of our current options, where it was completely out of place. Obviously, a lot of people who hadn’t a clue as to its meaning thought it impressive enough to display in public, no matter what it meant. Anyway, it sounded a lot like perimeter , which we had all met in plane geometry in junior high.

In my column, I implied that parameter had been stripped of its “legitimate” meaning, forgetting momentarily that language changes fairly constantly, so that illegitimate meanings often achieve legitimacy rather quickly, and that misuse through ignorance is one of the most common causes of change. It is the job of lexicographers to record the current usage of words and to reach a consensus on what the new meanings are.

I got some mail on that column. I’d have welcomed mail from crystallographers or mathematicians who might have enlightened me, brushing away the shadows from my benighted state of not-knowing. Alas, my mail was entirely from people who missed my point. Not their fault, of course. What they had done was to go to their dictionaries and look up parameter . A perfectly sensible move. They found references to such notions as “a characteristic element or constant factor,” “limit,” and “boundary,” none of which had any currency in 1966. I’ll bet my entire Swiss bank account that their dictionaries were all published during the 1970s or, more likely, the ‘80s.

I turned to my most recently published dictionary--the American Heritage, Second College Edition (1982). What I love about American Heritage is that it not only gives us the current definitions of words; it lets us have a peek at the seamy side of their history. Under parameter , it says, “Usage: This scientific term has been adapted to general usage. It is sometimes used in the sense of ‘a constant, a given, or a precondition.’ And sometimes in the sense of ‘a limit or boundary’ (perhaps influenced by perimeter): We must stay within the parameters of the present budget. They want to narrow the parameters of public debate. Violence and rebellion are parameters of modern life. None of these examples is acceptable to a majority of the Usage Panel.”

So this extraordinary word that had known only the lofty realms of crystallography and higher mathematics, where ignoramuses like me would be hopelessly lost, was, through no fault of its own, brought down to a tattered existence in the pedestrian world of common colloquy. Not only that; it is unacceptable to a majority of the Usage Panel. Crystallographers and mathematicians probably still use parameter in its original sense, but I suspect that they have some sense of regret, knowing that it has been sullied. I think, though, that it is more to be pitied than censured.

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