'Horrific' And 'Surreal': The Words We Use To Bear Witness

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

The recent events in Boston and West, Texas were different in many ways but people used the same language to describe them, particularly the words horrific and surreal. Our linguist Geoff Nunberg has these thoughts on how we talk about horror.

GEOFF NUNBERG, BYLINE: Mass shootings, bus crashes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks - we've gotten adept at talking about these things. Acts of God or acts of man, they're all horrific. At least that was the word you kept hearing from politicians and newscasters describing the Boston bombings and the explosion at the Texas fertilizer plant.

That may not strike you as surprising - the events were horrific, after all. But it's actually a new way of describing things. Horrific is an old word; it turns up in Thackeray and Melville. But until recent times it was rare and literary.

It didn't start to take off until a few decades ago, and it's been on a tear ever since - 10 times as common now as it was in 1970. Words sometimes catch on that way, like a pair of boots you've had in the back of the closet for years until one morning you pull them out and start wearing them every day.

But why now? I wondered if it had to do with the bleaching of horrible. Milton used horrible for the dungeons of hell. Now we use it for bad hair-dos. But horrific doesn't mean the same thing as horrible or horrifying - it's not just a fancy word for scary. The way it's used now, horrific doesn't describe events themselves so much as the reaction they evoke.

Horrific sights transfix and repel us at the same time. I asked a friend what he thought the word meant, and he sent me a link to a photo that appeared last month after the University of Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware suffered a gruesome leg fracture during an NCAA game.

It showed three of his teammates at courtside. The one in the middle had his arms around the other two and was gaping at the injury in wide-eyed horror. The one on his right had turned away, his face twisted in anguish. And the one on his left was staring ashenly up into space. Those are the three faces of the horrific: We gawk, we pull back convulsively, we turn away shaken.

But that's an extreme example. Most of the scenes we call horrific aren't immediate; they come to us remotely via TV or the Internet. And they're rarely as gut-wrenching as that one. The media were pretty circumspect about showing the most graphic pictures of the Boston carnage, just as they were after Sept. 11.

Of course there were plenty of websites eager to oblige the aficionados - this is the age, after all, that has enriched the English language with the term gore porn. But most of us found grist enough for our imaginations in the clips of the explosions and the blood-spattered sidewalks, not to mention the frequent intonations of the phrase body parts.

Imagination plays a big part here. The horrific feeds on glimpses and aftermaths: the image of a column of smoke, a bloody sidewalk, a devastated house, repeated incessantly. And like most people, I keep watching, switching from one channel and website to the next in the hope of seeing more. I can't really tell if the repeated images desensitize me or re-sensitize me to violence - probably both, one after the other, every time the pictures go by.

That's how we've learned to take this in. Think of the famously horrific images of the past half-century - the Oswald shooting, Challenger, the twin towers. It goes without saying that everybody has seen them, but is there anybody who has only seen them once?

Horrific belongs to television. The word started to catch on at the moment when the medium realized that audiences would watch raptly as they looped the same unsettling images, and its popularity surged along with cable news. The word appears more on TV news than in newspapers, and far more than in fiction or the movies. Behind horrific is the realization: Oh my God, this really happened.

But there was another word that kept appearing in the stories about Boston and Texas - surreal. That one didn't come from the public figures and commentators the way horrific did. It bubbled up from the firsthand reports of the witnesses on the scene. You could think of the two words as bookends.

The things we see as horrific have an indisputable realness that we alternately confront and shrink away from. Surreal is the word we reach for when reality overwhelms us, until it takes on what Merriam-Webster defines as the irrational reality of a dream. Though in these settings, it's more often another kind of unreality that comes to mind. It was surreal, the ones who saw it kept saying, like a scene in a movie.

As it happens, that's also new way of talking too. Surreal was a bit of arty jargon until it too became popular in the '60s. That initially had a lot to do with the counterculture - the word shows up a lot more frequently in Rolling Stone than on CBS News.

But the particular surreality of disaster scenes had another source. In Susan Sontag's last book, "Regarding the Pain of Others," she noted how often the words surreal and movie were coupled in eyewitness accounts of the 9/11 attacks. And she pointed to the affects of four decades of big-budget disaster films. Who needs the irrational reality of dreams when you have "The Towering Inferno?"

We have different ways of confronting these ghastly events: as horrific or surreal, as spectators gaping at reality or as eyewitnesses dissociating from it. We can experience them as television or as a movie, but always through a screen.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley School of Information. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.