Mind your language
I WAS making some scones (sultana) and looking at what my licence quaintly calls the television receiving equipment, which was turned on and presenting a programme on — well, television. There is a new kind of television that is not only digital (into which we may go some other time) but also interactive. Some people in America who already have this vastly improved sort of television were delight- ed because through it they were able to order from the post office some stamps, and they arrived the very next day.
My television doesn't order stamps or make scones, but my dictionary has a few things to say about that annoying word interactive. It is, historically, a development of active, the earliest appearance of which dates from the 14th century, as a gloss on a word in the splendid religious tract by Dan Michel (at the North Gate) called The Ayenbite of Inwyt. Dan Michel was keen on ren- dering latinate words in congelations of English morphemes; so he used ayenbite for remorse and inwyt for conscience. For active he used workvol (workful).
Anyway the word act, derived from Latin actus, knocked about, being adopted by Henryson in Scotland in the 15th century and in England in the 16th century, until in 1832 Isaac Taylor (who, like most of his family, was drawn to settle at Ongar in Essex, and was inter- ested in the 'morbid anatomy of spuri- ous religion') decided to publish anonymously a more devotional volume called Saturday Evening, in which he attributed to the Divinity 'Interactive Causes which must have products pos- sessing absolutely no affinity with any thing exterior to itself.
If this left few people better informed, it did not stop the computer folk in the mid-1960s using the word to refer to 'a computer or other electronic device that allows a two-way flow of information between it and the user, responding immediately to the latter's input'. I don't know why the OED included the qualification 'immediately' in its definition, but never mind.
There is no great mystery about inter- active. As a buzz-word it is irritating if it pretends to confer superiority on the object it describes. If Dan Michel were still around he might prefer a term like two-wayfaringly workful.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
