George Orwell (sorry Alamir, this is an old article) advocated for the “direct tinkering” of words because, as he said, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to for us to have foolish thoughts.” The word most in need of direct tinkering today is “random”. I admit the use of the word is on the decline (thanks to my complaining about it, I'd like to think), nevertheless, random still shows an extreme frequency in everyday use, a strange flexibility, and bland, non-sensical meanings. In any case, Alamir brought up the topic, so I thought I'd write a reply.

Orwell also said that any ready-made phrase and cliché “anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.” Random, in the conventional sense meaning “arbitrary” or “chance,” now has so many connotations that we use it usually when we don’t feel like consulting our brain to think of a better word: the right word. Random means almost anything. Actually, it’s used literally to mean "anything". It can also mean "weird", "various", "spontaneous", "suddenly", "vague", "surprising", even "melancholy" (as in “I’m just feeling a bit random”).

If you say a movie was “awesome,” it means absolutely nothing because you haven’t said anything. You expressed no real, that is, articulate thought ("what we express badly we do not know", as someone I quote too much said). The same with "random" when it’s used to mean both “unexpected” and “confusing.” It blurs language, ignores meaning, and erases the differences between things like “strange”, and “hard to explain”.

It’s not the abuse to the word that I’m objecting to, but the abuse to the mind of the person using it. Words are only tools, and so they are either sharp tools or dull tools. But random itself is not becoming duller: random is dulling the meaning of other words. Or to use another analogy, "random" spreads like ooze, devouring distinction and subtlety in the words it replaces. The word random has become a grunt.

If we have an unusual evening out, we might report that, “I don’t know man, it was so random.” That implies that nothing happened for any reason at all. Like it’s all just arbitrary: no cohesion, and events are non-caused. No story, no interpretation, no thought. But things aren’t arbitrary, and events are not chaotic. Things have causes and reasons. They don’t just happen. Life doesn't just appear out of a hat.

If we don’t understand something or don’t feel like formulating the words because that takes thought – painful thought – then we likely use "random". Indeed, it’s a very tempting word. But when we get lazy about expressing ourselves in this way – whether we can’t or simply don’t want to – we cease to use language, and language uses us.

So how did this whole random thing come about anyway? What’s to blame? Easy answer: the Internet. That’s also the right answer. The Web is the essence of randomness: things pop up out of nowhere; you hop from one topic to the next without causal or conceptual connection; and most of the content is mindless anyway. The chaos of so-called "information overload", too, smears meaning and lacks overall context. The websites you visit may be "linked" in some way, but your Internet "history", unlike actual history, is a string of barely related snippets of casual info. No wonder we describe everything as "random".

Jump around somewhere on the internet - MySpace, for example - and it won't be long before the word random appears in a blog title. Something like “My random day” or “Feeling random.” Perhaps what bothers me is that the random attitude is part of the whole “yeah, but what are you gonna do?” attitude of passivity and apathy, so rampant in our generation.

So, what are we gonna do? I say we take a tip from Orwell and tinker with our language to make sure that we use it instead of it using us. I always try to be as clear as possible when I speak or write. So hopefully you understood me. Or maybe this article doesn’t make any sense at all. Maybe it’s just random.


This piece was first published, in a very slightly different form, in The Capilano Courier, a long time ago.
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Matt Hogan is a humanities student at SFU and collects records, especially funk and kids records. So "random", eh?