Whilst cooking dinner chez wizzud a couple of days ago (roast belly of pork with, shame on me some readers will be shouting, shop-bought dauphinoise potatoes) I overheard a TV sports commentator at the Olympic Games talking about an event called the “uneven bars”. For most of my adult life I have been aware of a background murmur about the dangers of dumbing down and this, I think, is a prime example. Why are these bars no longer “asymmetric”? Asymmetric is a wonderful word. You can have endless arguments about how to spell it, for a start. I mentioned these uneven bars to Him Indoors, who commented that we will probably find that in the not too distant future the parallel bars have become known as the “even bars”, or the “side-by-side bars”.
I wonder; would the artistic search for symmetry have had the same importance if it had been a search for “evenness”? And would William Blake have bothered to write “what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful evenness”?
Language evolves, yes, but please don’t let’s lose words just because we can no longer be bothered to teach people what they mean.