About 20 years ago, I once wrote something like “the candidate’s speech was schizophrenic,” meaning, of course, that it displayed multiple personalities. A geneticist wrote to ask me not to use “schizophrenic” in that common but incorrect sense. At first I was going to scoff at her request, but the more I thought about it, I realized:
A. Schizophrenics don’t have multiple personalities.
B. Schizophrenics and their loved ones have enough problems as it is without pundits like me, who ought to know better, making their lives harder by helping reinforce in the public mind a misimpression about schizophrenia by using a lazy cliche.
So I haven’t, to the best of my knowledge, used “schizophrenic” in the metaphorical sense in many years.
But I haven’t noticed this being a terribly popular example of language reform.
I wonder why? In the past, many examples of language reform tended to come from the “euphemism treadmill,” where a term has become associated with empirical tendencies toward bad things, so a new term is invented to make people forget the statistical correlations. But then they notice them anyway, so a yet another new term has to be invented.
In contrast, not using “schizophrenic” to mean “multiple personalities” would be language reform to make language more empirically realistic. Perhaps there isn’t much of a constituency for that?
By the way, I see that “split personality” and “multiple personality disorder” have been renamed “dissociative identity disorder.” Are there really people with multiple personalities? With 8 billion people on earth, there are probably real examples of just about anything. But the concept is so wonderfully useful for screenwriters and actresses, e.g., Joanne Woodward and Sally Field, that some degree of skepticism is warranted.
Getting totally off topic, I thumbed through Sally Field’s recent autobiography In Pieces to see what impression her fellow Birmingham H.S. cheer squad member Michael Milken, the future financial titan who is one of the more consequential Americans of my lifetime, made on her. My vague recollection is that a lot of boys made a lasting impression on Sally, but Mike Milken was not one of them.
