Let’s try to be genuine about our illegitimacy

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?’

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100809014255AAkk8vW

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’.