Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today we're going to talk about the word impact as a verb and about the difference between sympathy and empathy.
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A change I often make when I'm editing podcast scripts from other writers is to get rid of the word impact, especially when it's being used as a verb, because I know it's a pet peeve for some listeners.
The American Heritage Dictionary says the word impact, in the figurative sense of a dramatic effect, came under criticism in the 1960s.
The thinking usually goes like this.
Impact is fine as a noun, as in the California wildfires had a huge impact on air quality.
But as a verb you should use it for only physical collisions or packing, as in.
Scientists expect an asteroid to impact Earth or he has an impacted tooth.
So this means I hear from people who don't like sentences such as the weather will impact fourth quarter sales.
And it's a quick change to avoid annoying people by editing that to the weather will affect fourth quarter sales.
One reason people give for not liking impact as a verb meaning to affect something is that they think it's new that the noun impact has been verbified.
Impact was actually a verb before it was a noun, going all the way back to the 1500s.
But it's used to mean have an effect on something is newer, only emerging in the early 1900s.
Further looking at how words have been used in the last hundred years on Google's Ngram viewer also explains why people feel like the verb is new.
Google Ngram has this cool trick where you can tag words by part of speech.
So you can look at how often impact has been used in books scanned by the Google Books Project, just as a noun and just as a verb.
So when I compare how people are using the noun and the verb, I see that they use the noun farmer often about 11 times as much.
But around 1970, the use of impact as a verb started to climb.
Today, people use impact as a verb about 23 times more often than they did in 1970.
So although impact as a verb to mean have an effect, has been around for more than 100 years, it can seem new, especially to older people who are seeing it far more often than they used to.
It's kind of like if we all started saying, I have the morbs, to describe feeling blue.
That phrase having the morbs goes back to Victorian England, but it would feel new and trendy because people haven't used it very much recently.
And speaking of England, British people sometimes complain that impact as a verb is an American abomination.
Well, the Google Ngram viewer also lets you separate American and British English.
And it does look like this was something that started in American English.
But it's also spread to British English.
The increase in impact as a verb in British English follows the same path as it does in American English, but the increase starts about 15 years later, in the mid-80s.
Today, people are using impact as a verb at about the same rate in American English and British English, at least in the published books included in the Google Books database.
So you may be wondering just how many people are annoyed by impact as a verb.
Well, the American Heritage Usage Panel weighed in on the question in both 2001 and 2015.
And although it's becoming more accepted, in 2015, 50 of the panel still objected to the sentence.
The court ruling will impact the education of minority students.
And at that time the dictionary said using impact as a verb in this way was quote best avoided unquote.
But that was a while ago, so I decided to ask my social media followers what they think of a similar sentence.
Construction at the first street exit will impact traffic.
More than 1000 people voted and people were more accepting of it than the American Heritage Panel had been back in 2015.
It could be that my social media followers are more lax than the usage panel, although I kind of doubt that.
Or it could be that the trend toward acceptance is continuing.
There was a pretty big difference in sentiment between different social media channels, too.
LinkedIn was the toughest crowd, with only 68% saying the sentence was fine.
And Mastodon was the most accepting, with 90% saying the sentence was fine.
I found people's comments interesting, too.
It was clear that many people who use impact this way are doing so because they aren't sure which spelling of effect to use.
There were also people who voted that the sentence was fine, but only because it's a lost cause that isn't worth fighting, and they said they still don't like it and personally wouldn't use it.
Finally, I'll add that, even if you don't object to impact as a verb, it's often a weak choice because it's vague.
The sentence construction at the first street exit will impact traffic leaves people wondering how construction will impact traffic.
Something like construction will slow traffic or reduce the number of lanes or delay buses during rush hour would be much more informative and helpful.
So when I'm editing out an impact, I often consider whether the sentence would benefit from a bigger rewrite than just changing it to a fact.
So the bottom line is that impact has been a verb for a really long time.
But the use that annoys people to mean have an effect on something is newer and has increased a lot since the 1970s.
It'll still annoy a small but significant percentage of your readers.
And it's also vague.
So if you're writing or editing, it's worth taking a look at sentences that use impact as a verb to see if you can make them better.
Marsha from Springfield Oregon, wrote in saying she remembers learning a clear difference between sympathy and empathy.
That sympathy was how she might feel for you when you were struggling with something, or maybe when something sad has happened to you, like your house flooded.
And empathy was more about walking in someone else's shoes, feeling sad because the same thing had happened to you, and you know how it feels.
But now it seems like empathy has taken over everything except sympathy cards when someone has died.
She said she even heard a journalist she respects explaining that there are two different kinds of empathy, one of them being what she thought was sympathy.
So what happened?
Well, Marsha is on to something.
People do use these words differently than they used to and, as someone in her 70s, she's lived through the shift.
Let's start with sympathy, which is the older of the two words.
It came into English through Latin in the late 1500s and goes back to the Greek word sympathia, formed from syn, meaning together, and pathos, meaning feeling or suffering.
So the literal meaning was feeling together or fellow feeling.
And according to Edam Online, sympathy had some pretty wild uses at first.
For example, in superstitions that were considered medicine back in those days, people used something called powder of sympathy or sympathy powder that could supposedly heal wounds just by being applied to a cloth stained with blood from the wound or to a weapon that had caused the wound.
People believed there was a cosmological link between the wound and these things at a distance the blood or the weapon and that they were in sympathy with each other.
But the less mystical meaning we're more familiar with today a feeling of sadness or compassion for someone developed pretty quickly.
The first citation for that in the OED is from the 1600s.
But eventually, the meaning began to change.
In the late 20th century, sympathy started to acquire a negative connotation.
Today saying I have sympathy for you can suggest you're in a superior, stable position looking down on someone in trouble, like that person whose house flooded.
Sympathy started to sound too much like pity, and pity can feel patronizing.
And this is where empathy comes in.
Although sympathy has been with us for more than 400 years, empathy only popped its head up in 1909.
According to Edam Online, empathy was a translation of the German word Einfühlung, which literally means feeling into.
But it wasn't originally about understanding other people at all.
Instead, Einfühlung was a technical term in German art theory.
It described how viewers could project their own feelings and imagined movements into objects.
You could feel into a painting's abstract lines and sense them as moving, because you projected your inner sense of movement into them.
A mountain or architectural column appeared to rise, because you transferred your feeling of stretching upwards into it.
Empathy was about the aesthetic experience, your ability to merge imaginatively with what you were looking at.
For decades, empathy was mostly limited to psychology and art theory.
But if you look at Google Ngram data, which again tracks word usage in books, you can see a huge increase in usage, starting in the 1980s and 1990s.
As people became more interested in emotional intelligence and connection, it seems like they needed more ways to talk about them.
And we were also starting to need a word that sounded supportive without being patronizing.
So empathy filled the gaps.
But to play this new role, the definition of empathy had to loosen up.
It had to expand beyond that strict idea of walking in someone's shoes that Marsha described from her youth.
Psychologists now talk about two different types of empathy.
Affective empathy actually feeling what the other person feels the original definition.
And cognitive empathy intellectually understanding someone's perspective, without necessarily feeling the emotion viscerally.
This is probably what the journalist Marsha Heard was talking about.
And that cognitive form of empathy has sometimes replaced what we used to call sympathy.
It.
Lets us say I get where you're coming from, without the patronizing weight of I feel sorry for you.
But Marsha also noticed that we still use sympathy for death.
We send sympathy cards and express our deepest sympathy when someone loses a loved one.
So why didn't empathy take over there, too?
Well, it could be because empathy feels presumptuous when talking about death.
Empathy still has some of that original I know how you feel connotation.
So if someone loses a spouse and you say I empathize, it could feel like too much.
Sympathy is still the word we use when someone dies, because it acknowledges to the loved ones that we feel deeply for them, but we understand that we're on the outside of their very personal pain.
It's a situation where maintaining emotional distance is often seen as respectful rather than feeling cold.
It also wouldn't surprise me if sympathy has maintained that use, in part because we've bought sympathy cards for decades for that purpose.
So the word is stickier in that situation.
Although there is a company called M and Friends that makes empathy cards.
So who knows, maybe empathy will encroach on sympathy's last holdout someday too.
I'll also note that you'll sometimes hear sympathy used in the context of politics and labor disputes, where we talk about sympathizers and sympathy strikes.
And maybe calling back to those early mystical meanings.
We sometimes hear of people having sympathy pains when someone they love is suffering.
But the bottom line is that Marsha has noticed a real change in the way we use these words.
We can call it the Great Empathy Takeover.
Sympathy was demoted because it often sounds too much like pity.
And empathy expanded to cover both feeling with someone and understanding someone's perspective, making it something of the default word for modern emotional connection.
But when somebody dies, sympathy survives because empathy would be presumptuous.
You can't really know that specific pain unless you've lived it.
And even then, every loss is different.
Thanks for the question.
Finally, I have a familect story from Peter.
In my youth, the family would acknowledge someone's mistake with a sarcastic, big help, Irving.
It was 20 years later before I discovered the source of that line from Frank Gallup's The Ballad of Irving.
I was curious about the Ballad of Irving and I found a recording on YouTube.
It's a comedy song from 1966 about the 142nd fastest gun in the West.
I'll put a link to it in the transcript.
And thanks, Peter.
That was fun.
If you want to share the story of your familect or special word or phrase you use with your family, Leave a message on the voicemail line or record a message on SpeakPipe.
And you'll find the information for both those options in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Rebecca Sebastian and Nat Hoops in marketing, Morgan Christensen in advertising, Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, and Dan Feierabend in audio, who recently got a new tattoo depicting an early 2000s computer and a software activation key in ribbons.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
