If I were to ask you what the word “cosmetic” means, I presume you would answer something like “superficial, inessential”. Indeed, no less an authority than Chambers Dictionary defines it as follows:
“cosmetic adj 1 used to beautify the face, body or hair. 2 improving superficially, for the sake of appearance only.”
Well, I have just discovered that some manufacturers of white goods (fridges, dishwashers) have redefined the word for the purposes of their warranties.
oo-er, by Terry Freedman
Example 1: An arm of the dishwasher, without which you cannot use the middle tray, is designated as cosmetic rather than mechanical. To be absolutely accurate, you can use the upper tray if you only put a few light things in it, like a plastic pot or two, or a tea strainer. Alternatively, you can take the middle tray out completely if you don’t mind risking a flood, because on the bottom of the middle tray is a propellor thing that makes the water go into the right hole. But for all practical purposes, that arm is an essential mechanical device, so how on earth can the manufacturers get away with calling it “cosmetic”?
Example 2: Someone told me he had to replace the door of a fridge. When he put in a claim under the warranty, he was told that the door wasn’t covered because it was classified as “cosmetic”. Do you know of any fridges that will work without a door?
This is exactly the sort of thing that Kenneth Hudson railed against in his Dictionary of Diseased Language, which I wrote about in Mind your language. As I put it in that article:
“Words are being used in ways which are completely wrong – in fact, in some cases the meaning is the exact opposite of the way the word is being used.”
This may be very clever on the part of manufacturers and other purveyors of goods and services, but in my opinion it has two deleterious effects.
The first, which we might designate as “localised” is to sow the seeds of distrust in the minds of customers, and to damage your own brand. Imagine if, presented with a complaint by a client that the information contained in an article I wrote for them, and on which the whole of the argument in the article depended, was factually incorrect, I responded by saying “That information was only cosmetic, so I’m not returning your fee or rewriting the article.”
The second, which is far worse in the long run, is the debasement of the language. That’s why I get annoyed when I come across articles in which the writer says “disinterested” when they mean “uninterested”, or “continuous” when they mean “continual”. I accept that meanings can change over time. For example, saying “I was literally starving”, when you literally were not, has become a sort of literary device used for emphasis. But to use the completely wrong word, like compliment rather than complement, is either ignorance or idleness, or (because we can all make mistakes when racing towards a deadline) at the very least poor editorship. Indeed, there are some magazines that are so replete with errors of this kind (like the review in which the writer stated that the book was compulsory reading meaning, one presumes, that it was compulsive reading) that I won’t submit any articles to them. One tends to be judged by the company one keeps, so why would any self-respecting writer wish to be associated with such shoddiness?
We writers have a duty to do what we can to preserve the dignity of the language in which we work.
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