Can you relate?
The rise of a Hollywood-ism; plus, going R-free
“RELATABLE - WHAT IS that?” demanded the subject line of Christina Thompson’s e-mail. The message itself took a calmer tone. Thompson, who edits the Harvard Review and teaches writing and editing, has been hearing the word more and more often, she said, to describe “something one can relate to, as in ‘it’s a very relatable book.’
“I’m wondering where this comes from,” she wrote. “I’m sure it was not around when I was young.” And though we are all vulnerable to the Recency Illusion - the impression that a usage is newer than it really is - in the case of the new relatable, Thompson may be right.
There was an old relatable, too, dating to the early 19th century, when it was used to mean either “able to be told” or “able to be related to something else.” The pop-psych relatable is much more recent; it came along only after the 20th century had given relate its new sense, “to have an attitude of personal and sympathetic relationship to.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of the usage, dated 1950, is an education journal’s reference to “the varying ways children relate to the teacher.”
Relatable, however, got its big break not in education or psychology but in Hollywood. By the late ’70s, it began to appear in print to describe the kind of character TV and movie audiences will respond to emotionally - or “relate to.” (As early as 1977, a Los Angeles Times reviewer was already applying the word to a novelist’s creations: “There isn’t a single likable or relatable character between the covers.”)
In the decades since, its universal adoption by the TV industry has inevitably pushed relatable toward mainstream status. In 1988, Billy Crystal told the New York Times that Bill Cosby’s albums were “relatable.” In 1995, the updated Nancy Drew was declared “very relatable.”
So is relatable respectable? Not quite, says Bryan Garner. In the new edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage, he ranks relate to 4 out of 5 (“Ubiquitous, but …”) on his language-change index. (He doesn’t deign to mention relatable.)
And plenty of readers - Thompson and me included - still hear relatable as entertainment-industry jargon, a word that only a callow youth would use in the context of classic literature. (Is Lear relatable? Becky Sharp? Captain Ahab? I guess we would have to concede that Austen’s leading ladies are “relatable” - but then, they’ve long since been transformed into screen stars.)
Another possible objection to relatable, though I haven’t heard anyone make it, is its formation: What it really means is relate-to-able. The 19th-century usagists campaigned fiercely against reliable on similar grounds: Obviously, their reasoning went, we don’t rely anything, we rely upon it. The right expression would be rely-upon-able.
But the people didn’t listen, and reliable settled into the language despite the mavens’ resistance. Relatable, which has met no such opposition, seems pretty certain to follow.
. . .
R-LESS IN BOSTON: Part one of Gary Lucia’s tale will be familiar to anyone who has spent some time in this region. At his workplace, he reported recently, he saw a non-working drawer labeled with a sign alerting the carpenter: BROKEN DRAW.
For people with nonrhotic, or r-less, accents - and that category isn’t limited to native Bostonians - the pronunciation “draw” (or perhaps “drawuh”) is entirely normal. And it’s no surprise that some of those people, after a lifetime of hearing “draws,” would slip into the phonetic spelling.
But part two of Lucia’s story has a plot twist. “I work in a commission-based store,” he writes, “so we have to sell enough to make our ‘draw’ before we start earning commission. Several co-workers not from Boston, hearing the Boston-accented employees saying ‘I have to make my draw,’ thought the Bostonians were saying ‘drawer’ with the local accent. So they started saying things like, ‘Just $500 more until I make my drawer!’ ”
Newcomers, add this footnote to your Wicked Awesome glossary: Sometimes “draws” are furniture, and sometimes they’re underpants. But when it comes to commission sales, a “draw” really is a draw.
. . .
REGARDING HENRY: In the Oct. 25 Word column, about the phrase “not to put too fine a point on it,” I mistakenly fingered Henry James as a heavy user of the expression. Not so, e-mailed Kirk McElhearn, who has just set out to re-read James’s fiction (he blogs about it at Reading Henry James), and who had the e-texts at his fingertips.
James did use “too fine a point on it” - the OED quotes him - but sparingly, not heavily, and perhaps only in his nonfiction. As McElhearn guessed, I was misremembering; James was indeed a heavy user of fine and, especially, in fine, meaning “to sum up, finally.” In fine, I am exposed as an inferior Jamesian with a faulty memory. Time to go back to the books!
Jan Freeman’s book, “Ambrose Bierce’s ‘Write It Right’: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers,” will be published next week by Walker & Co. Write to her at mailtheword@gmail.com. 
