Sense of déjà vu
A correspondent filed a piece on the reopening of the Bath Spa after a series of delays. She opened her dispatch with this sentence - "Many Bath residents will be having a sense of déjà vu". She went on to explain that there had been a ceremony to reopen the Baths three years ago. At the last minute the decision had been taken not allow the public in. Until now.
The correspondent used the word déjà vu to mean that the people of Bath would be reliving something they had already experienced.
However, according to the dictionary, déjà vu does not mean that at all; in fact rather the reverse. It means the experience of thinking you are reliving some event or feeling when you have not; you are experiencing it for the first time.
But this raises the question - when does a word change its meaning? Words are for conveying understanding, never more so than in radio reports when the audience has only one chance to hear what is being said. So if most people use a word to mean one thing, does that become its true meaning?
Tim Bailey is editor of the Radio 4 Six O'Clock News
Comments
My pet peeve is the word 'decimate'.
Originally meaning 'to punish every tenth person', the meaning of the word has now changed to the point that it now means wholesale slaughter!
Surely it would only be deja vu if the baths had failed to open this time as well. I doubt any residents of Bath experienced them opening the first time around 2000 years ago, so they are indeed thinking they have experienced it, when they haven't.
So I side with the reporter!
Technically 'deja vu' means already (deja) seen (vu - participle of voir). So in the purest sense the correspondent is right.
Since you are discussing grammatical errors in news pieces .. your current headline has the following sub text:
"Hezbollah fires the biggest number of rockets into Israel so far"
The "biggest" number? Even with my somewhat limited grasp of english, I would have used "greatest" or perhaps "largest" ...
Language evolves - of course commonly accepted meanings will prevail by definition. The problem is in the transition from the prior meaning to the new when the traditionalist says one thing but communicates another.
I remember the story. It gives me a feeling of deja view. I have seen it before. I remember the cost was higher than expected and it was going to end up in higher council taxes or whatever. So you could say that the local people are taking a Bath.
On the other hand, having seen photographs of the place on one of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ web pages, I can say I am impressed and might like to go there sometime so maybe it has potential. Someone I know from a mailing list called BPG-L recently announced he is retiring to Bath, so maybe I shall visit the place someday.
Christopher
Good question, and applicable to a host of other linguistic problems.
See also: Alright vs. All right. For good look, dig up a recent "On Language" from the NYT magazine. It's behind a paywall, but I know that it was within the last month or so.
I've always understood deja vu as "a feeling of having experienced this before" which may or may not be a mistaken belief.
Obviously my understanding of the definition was in itself a mistaken belief, but I've held it for 20+ years so it's not like a new understanding…
"Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance," was Dr. Johnson's answer to a reader who asked how he had managed to misdefine a word in his dictionary.
I just forget, was it Humpty Dumpty or one of the Tweedle brothers who said a word means precisely what he wants it to mean? This is true of all words - as long as the recipients understand the intended meaning of the word it doesn't matter what the dictionary definition is, surely. As you say, words are for conveying information. If that is done successfully with the misuse of a word then all is well with the world. How do you think we ended up with our current set of words?
The memorable expression is "deja vu all over again" which is attributable to the New York Yankees baseball player and master of the American language Yogi Berra. Among his other memorable quips is "when you get to a fork in the road, take it."
well I think the use of Deja vu by the correspondent is technically correct. To be used in its true sense (dictionary sense) this word can't be used at all to describe general life experiences except deja vu experiences themselves.
I think you've one good point thr about words changing meanings and usage to convey similar meanings.
Here in Brazil, Portuguese is a living language. With Internet many languages are greatly influenced by the introduction of foreign words, particularly English, normally with similar spelling and meaning to the mother language. However some words change: billboard became ‘outdoor’ and cheese-burger became ‘X-burger’ (the letter X has the sound sheese)
Words tend to change through misunderstanding and common usage.
I think "Deja vu" may have been correct in this context as the website for the Bath Spar was actually not working on the days that this news story ran so the virtual public still couldn't get in!