The semantic Bank of England has just announced that the government’s rhetorical inflation target has been met. For a long time, it has been impermissible to call anyone a “model”: all are supermodels. Now, no one is sensitive without being “oversensitive”. If you are at all aroused, you are “overexcited”. To be worried about anything under the sun is to be “overanxious”. What exactly is going on?
Some such usages are mere boasting. If I’ve heard something twice, I will drawl jadedly that it is “overfamiliar”. But this same word, when applied to people, illustrates how an “over-” compound implies an appropriate level of some behaviour that has been regrettably exceeded. The American GI in Britain during the second world war was, famously, said to be “overpaid, oversexed, and over here”. These days he might be called overfamiliar. (You are being “overfamiliar” if you address me by my first name before we have got married.)
The most politically interesting of these compounds, perhaps, is “oversensitive”. It is often wielded as an insult by people who congratulate themselves on abusing those less fortunate than they are, in the name of “free speech”. If, say, Muslims or transgender people who are thus cheerfully abused dare to complain, they must be “oversensitive”. Because to call them merely “sensitive” would be to admit that one’s own defiant “lack of political correctness” is in fact an irritant, deliberately applied.
This familiar context for “oversensitive” shows, indeed, that the word seeks to decide for others what it is right for them to feel. It would be nice to think that this is a symptom of some burgeoning populist Aristotelianism, for Aristotle thought that a virtue usually consisted of a happy medium between two vicious extremes. More likely, however, is that it is part of the generalised affective authoritarianism of our culture, according to which workers in fast-food shops must not only sell sandwiches but actively perform happiness. Similarly, if marginalised people feel hurt by public ridicule, then their mistake is simply to be feeling too much. If they just dialled down the sensitivity and adopted a fixed smile, we could all get along just fine.
None of this is to say that “oversensitive” is an unnecessary word. It can usefully be applied, for instance, to the twitchy brakes of a car. And if I forget your name at a party and you proceed to shoot me in the face, I might (if I survive) with justice accuse you of oversensitivity to perceived slights. Plus, like any word in the right hands, it has comic potential. In his novel A Damsel in Distress, PG Wodehouse writes of a character having the “same feeling which a composer with an over-sensitive ear would suffer on hearing his pet opus assassinated by a schoolgirl”. Here the unnecessary prefix is part of the joke – the idea is that a composer of merely ordinary sensitivity would not mind at all hearing his work murdered by a juvenile.
Let us refrain, though, from claiming too quickly that we use too many “over-” words today because we have all silently agreed to work unpaid as the emotion police. Some of these compounds, after all, are surprisingly ancient: “over-anxious”, for example, dates from the 17th century. (Is there ever a good level of anxiety?) So to attribute them all to the perversities of modern culture might be an oversimplification.
Oh yes, that’s another one. Rarely do you hear someone say something has been “simplified”; more often it has been “oversimplified”. (And so my erudite sophistication has been insulted.) As with “oversensitive”, though, “oversimplification” does have a useful meaning, and we shouldn’t risk obscuring it through excessive application. (The best formulation of it is probably Albert Einstein’s: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”)
To see whether we do actually overuse “over-” words, we could experiment with opposites. We might test, for instance, whether “oversensitive” is well applied in a given situation by considering, in neo-Aristotelian fashion, if “undersensitive” would sound right describing the opposite reaction. I could give more examples, but frankly – as so many of us have been these last 450 years – I am overtired.
