Transcendent

From StoneHome

Ugh. This one pretty much just warrants a sound of disgust. Unfortunately, it seems that people don't grasp the importance of word selection, and of course like every other misword they defend their choice until it's slapped straight out of their slack jawwed mouths, so Here We Go Again™.

Transcend what, exactly?

"We want a transcendent web design which..." Transcendent as a word refers to a topical second noun. Something cannot simply be transcendent; it must transcend something else. Therefore, it wouldn't matter if you were Michelangelo entering a world which had never seen either art or religion; no matter how much you made, you could not reasonably say "my work is transcendent." You could say "my work transcends the previous limits of art in this world." That would be perfectly legitimate, if arrogant. Admittedly, with some serious effort one can set up a mechanism by which to transcend may legally refer to a previously stated comparator, though that's hella difficult even accepting a stretch.

Still, that's just not how the asshats of the world use this word. "I want my game design to be both fun and transcendent." Bullet. "I want my thesis to be intellectually transcendent." Missile. "I am transcendent." Crucifixion.

The truth is that if you're using these words in this fashion, you're really not qualified to use these words at all. Yes, I am hereby shaming approximately one in ten web developers, and I both understand and accept this as presumptuous; web developers frequently scrape the underside of the bottom of the barrel for grammar and presentation anyway, so this shouldn't be particularly novel. Similarly, these people frequently misuse words like multimedia, paradigm and signify.

The Nature of Transcendance

To transcend is to rise above something else. It is by nature and by needs a comparative term: one needs a watermark against which to judge one's surmounting of a barrier or threshhold. One may transcend one's background, one's education, one's social caste; one may transcend one's family, friends or enemies; one may transcend one's stereotype, one's expectations, or even one's own plans. It is commonly observed of great poets that a work transcends its genre, of religious magnates that a wisdom transcends their office's perspectives, of a child that their intelligence transcends their age. These are legitimate poetic-license uses of the word, not technically but in content correct. It could be said that a great auteur transcends their medium, their topic, the limits of their form. However, a great auteur cannot simply transcend; there needs to be a watermark of some sort. A child's intelligence may not transcend.

The Usage of Transcendance

This is, of course, a far more subjective judgement to make. Still, just as diva is thrown about in a tacky fashion, transcend is simply used wrongly quite often - not just used incorrectly, but in a place where its content just doesn't fit. This is of course far more offensive to the language snob than simple usage error: not everyone can place a word correctly (hell, half the time I use 'which' instead of 'that' or 'who',) but there's this sort of deep undercurrent of disappointment which runs alongside someone attempting to use words above their ken. One can for the sake of creating a misleadingly vivid metaphor compare the reaction of royalty to extremely wealthy but crude individuals which go to thousand-dollar plate charity luncheons and loudly eat with their hands, mouths wide open throughout. Similarly, one might see this sort of reaction when attending a tech conference bragging that someone's T3 is slow because they have a T5, at a car convention talking about what gets mixed into the octane in gasoline, or at a cooking show telling people that omelettes aren't just French. It's the disposition of the ignorant pretending to be wise, the demeanor of someone taking on aires of something they're not - in short, the fucking posers.

If you purport that your business exists to create transcendent items or services, then you, my dear friend, are a fucking poser.

When referring to people, however, transcend connotatively becomes a word used of great things, typically ephemeral or categoric in nature. Great may be interpreted within its bounds: this could as easily mean a strong form of good as it could broad, or large, or encompassing in nature. More clearly, the applicable targets of transcendance tend to be groups, settings, stereotypes, lofty goals, levels of achievement. It is not appropriate to say that one has transcended the driver's license test, even if one failed on difficulty and later succeeded: though by content the word is literally correct in use, someone which reads books will get stomach pains and frequently die on reading such a passage. Moreover, this is the best use of the word; to use it in reference to overcoming difficulties is unnessecarily florid, and only occasionally a defensible choice. This means that the word used in other contexts tends to have the grim spectre of a much larger, much more hackle-raising error, which although not wholly earned is no less disgusting. As a coarse rule of thumb, if you can't swap in the phrases "rise above," "move beyond" or "overcome" with a straight face, you need to hand your pen over to someone which knows how to write.

In the sense of individuals, transcend is a big word. To transcend is something a handful of people on Earth do once each a generation. A transcendance is a capital-s capital-e Significant Event, worthy of historic significance. Alexander the Great transcended the territorial limitations of the nation-states of his day. Mother Theresa transcended the boundaries of fear when working with plague victims. Jack the Ripper transcended the very definition of killer of his day. Mohandas Ghandi transcended the bigotry and contentious nature of change of his day to establish a civil and humane way to resist oppression. Nelson Mandela transcended hatred, racism, oppression, wrongful imprisonment, governmental segregation and the expectations of his peers in re-establishing his country. To transcend makes a man or a woman into a Great Man or a Great Woman. We're looking at the Thomas Acquinasses of the world, the Joan d'Arcs, the Darius IIs, the Atistotles, the Plinyies. Lately, we've had Martin Luther King, Alan Turing, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Feynman, Hitler. (Transcend is not defined as a good thing; Hitler transcended the limits of cruelty and hatred just as surely as Mother Theresa did love and compassion.) Maybe John Lennon counts. Maybe the Dalai Lama. Maybe Don Knuth or Alan Ginsberg, Timothy Leary or even Ayn Rand (though not if you ask me.)

But a business plan? A marketing campaign? A web page?

Go to Hell.

Anger

You want your web page to be transcendent? Make it change all of our lives forever in a deep and meaningful way. (No, not even Google counts. It has to be something your children still see the importance of having happened. My children will accept Google as a fundamental part of life in the way that I did sewage and electricity. I still know the importance of the actions of Martin Luther and Shaka Zulu. I don't even know the name of the person which financed the American electrifaction.)

Until then, chances are if it uses that word the page isn't even terribly interesting, and I'll put three to two odds that the phrases "outside the box" or "empowering the customer" are scrawled somewhere too. Using big words may get you the stupid clients, but those among us which have actually read things printed on paper understand that one does not use a big word when a little word would suffice. Big words only belong when nothing else will do. (In Emma's better wording, "brevity is the essence of wit.") Think that means that someone you know, as Drano might say, "fails it" ? Don't be so sure: it's most common that the same people which think that any fancy impressive word would do don't actually understand the underlying connotations of said word, and therefore aren't grasping the full content of what's being told them, even when they have memorized the dictionary definitions involved (hence my admonition that one should learn English from literature or not at all.)

Enjoy making transcendent web pages for little print shops and resteraunts. We're sure you'll do well changing the very nature of human existince by plopping price lists and quality of service guarantees onto an already massively commercially bloated web; my god, the way you wrote a dollar ninety nine just opened my eyes. In the meantime, just realize that nobody's fooled but you.

Notes

• No, not Drano the cleaning agent. It's someone's name. Don't ask; he doesn't want to hear from you.
• Thanks to Mauke for pointing out that I can't spell.