I wrote this short essay hoping it could go in Slate.com and I could get some money. Now I've written it, the answer is obviously not, and I've an even deeper respect for Slate's writers and editors.
‘I have
legitimately no idea what legitimately means.’ <== This
is a big problem.
Search Twitter
for ‘legitimately’ and you will find an illegitimate ‘legitimately’ born every
minute. Here’s my beef – all these
people mean ‘genuinely’, or maybe ‘authentically’. Something genuine has the
right ‘origins’ story. A genuine spiderman
has been bitten by a radioactive spider. Someone who genuinely loves you does
it out of their heart, not social obligation or pecuniary interest. But someone who genuinely loves you could still
be an overbearing, smothering brute, or a coolly distant critic. Their love is genuine and has the right
origins, but in its social expression it is not legitimate. Legitimacy exists when there norms that are
being upheld. You can’t legitimately put ‘legitimately’ in front of an entirely
subjective experience. ‘I had
legitimately no idea it was your birthday honey’ is not going to wash, unless
you can prove the complicated negative that you didn’t know what day (or, given
the seriousness of the example, month) it was, or that you had a very serious
head injury and forgot the day of your honey’s birth. ‘I genuinely had no idea’ describes a
recognizable experience – but one that still needs an apology, because it is
not legitimate.
A Yahoo!
Answers user called ‘The Global Village’ looked into this in 2010, in the
proper place- public opinion. ‘Does
legitimate mean genuine, or legal?’
Unfortunately:
“Best Answer chosen by Asker” – ‘genuine.’ Several better and more correct
answers are ignored. That answer was already in the mind of the questioner.
I’ll allow
that there is a lot of overlap: plenty of things are legitimate if they are
genuine and vice versa (bank notes, love notes, damning evidence). And, I
grudgingly suppose, it’s a fine line between a solecism and a first recorded
usage in etymology and being a pedant. Two fine lines. I fight it because there’s a lot riding on
this confusion. Creation science – I want to say practitioners? – genuinely hold
their views. Homophobia is genuine. All the most bloody and foul impulses that
course through us are genuine.
I think the
trouble began with democracy. At the
point that legitimacy derived from a ‘mandate from the masses’ rather than some
relatively orderly process (a watery tart lobbing a scimitar, for example), we
had pretty much given up on it, and then who cares what words mean any
more? You go in the booth and pull the
lever and your opinion is as good as the next person’s.
Of course, trying to get legitimate legitimacy
was the death of a lot of people. Legitimacy
is REALLY HARD – the letter kills. There can be no way to get there, from here. Genuineness, on the other hand, is available
to everyone (although the existentialists, who think it’s terribly important, think
it’s a narrow way that only a few find.)
The Enlightenment repented from extroverted legitimacy-seeking (in the
English civil war and succession-wrangling before and after) in the Act of
Toleration. Democracy is probably for
the best. We can’t be sure what’s
legitimate, but we can all try to let each other be genuine. This is all very well for actual reality –
but if we lose the word ‘legitimately’, then we don’t even know what we
overcame in getting to ‘genuineness’.
