Words I'd Like to Reclaim: Impact

Its impact is still being felt today.

Nothing has had more of an impact on me than the insidious slip of the word impact from noun to verb.

My earliest memory of this vile usage was in 1977 during Star Wars. The climax of the movie was upon us: Luke Skywalker was speeding through the trench of the Death Star when a companion X-Wing fired his torpedos at the space station's Achilles' Heel. A man shouts: "It's away!" as an explosion blossoms promisingly on the screen. But: "That's a negative... just impacted on the surface."

Everyone in the audience groaned, but I may have been the only one who groaned at the use of impact as a verb.

I know, I need to get over it. It was 35 years ago, I was only 7, the Death Star was destroyed, Mark Hamill went on to do The Guyver, etc. But the continued erosion of impact suggests, to me, Imperial entanglement.

There is no reason to use impact as a verb. We have a perfectly good verb extant which works just fine, thank you very much. It's neat, quick and to the point: hit. Now, my husband argued that impact (vb) has a much greater impact (n) than hit. I disagreed and suggested that the impact (n) when I popped him in the nose would feel pretty much the same whether he was hit by me or impacted by me.

Why kidnap a word and put it to wrong usage when there's no gap requiring filling? What did hit ever do to deserve this kind of treatment? It's single-syllablism raising its ugly head again, isn't it? There seems to be a belief that using a word with more syllables, even though it is the wrong word, makes a person look more intelligent (like people who say 'at this moment in time' when everyone knows they really mean 'now'). Trust me. It doesn't.

Will our planet explode? Will the use of impact (v) erase the forces of good in our galaxy? Of course not.

But it's unnecessary obfuscation and, face it, just plain poor use of a fine and noble word that already has enough to do with its time.