"There's no danger of abilify becoming a conventionally accepted verb any time soon," says Wall Street Journal "Word on the Street" columnist Ben Zimmer. (Otsuka representatives declined to comment for this story.) Nor are people in mental distress likely to ask for Abilify the way a diner might ask for "a Coke" without much caring if she gets a Pepsi instead. The fruits of such a strategy are hard to discern: even though the name is catchy, it's hard to imagine psychopharmacologists swayed (or confused) by a clever name. Let the record also show that there does not appear to be a mass epidemic of ordinary people using abilify in the way that Fiske fears.įiske told me that he does not have direct evidence-say, a nefarious memorandum from Bristol-Myers Squibb or Otsuka America, which make Abilify-suggesting a clandestine strategy to invade the lexicon. Let the record show that for all his abuses of the English language, George W. Bush would say, as in, 'We need to abilify our troops to fight the terrorists' 'We need to abilify those kids so they become educationable.'"
He apparently believes that the word's proximity to ability and its muscular, active - ify suffix will cause people to readily conflate it with, you know, an actual word: "Abilify sounds like something George W.
AMBIFY WITH SPOTIFY FULL
West wrote, "Depression: It's like when Carol is on the rag, only all the time!" Though she discusses only the marketing imagery associated with Abilify (as well as Cymbalta, Wellbutrin and others), its name fits into her conception, with Abilify as an empowering agent, giving women the ability to be full women again.įiske (who also railed against "Abilify" in his book on poor usage) believes this to be a "deliberate corporate strategy to (1) make the drug sound effective, indeed, active and powerful, and, more important, (2) encourage people to use the brand name as a common verb." He gives the example of both Xerox and Kleenex. Last year, Jezebel writer Lindy West accused the makers of such drugs-including Abilify-of running ads that specifically targeted women, making mental illness seem like a particularly female affliction. Suspicion over the marketing of antidepressants and antipsychotics is not new. Monday's culprit was, as you might have guessed, "Abilify."Īccording to Fiske, "Abilify sounds as though it might be a verb meaning to make able… Abilify might one day mean to be powerfully effective or to make able, and the more people use it as such, the more likely, these advertisers (and the linguistic hirelings who work for them) hope, the brand-name drug for combating bipolar disorder and depression will be known and bought."
This does not make Abilify a seeming candidate for popular usage on the order of amazeballs.Īnd yet.… A warning arrived in my in-box yesterday morning via The Vocabula Review, a daily language newsletter compiled by Robert Hartwell Fiske, who has authored books like Robert Hartwell Fiske's Dictionary of Unendurable English and To The Point: A Dictionary of Concise Writing.įiske is a sort of fire-watcher of suspect usage: The most amusing aspect of his daily newsletter (which he says has 5,000 subscribers) is the "disagreeable English" screed that rails against the Visigoths who know not, say, the difference between literally and figuratively, who use parameter outside of trigonometry class, who mistake affect for effect. Its generic name is Aripiprazole its chemical structure is 7-butoxy]-3,4-dihydrocarbostyril. One branch of this pop-culture lexical invasion is the brand name that comes to encapsulate a whole class of object: Xerox for all copiers being probably the most prevalent example of such corporatist synecdoche.Īnd then there is Abilify, which is a drug that helps thousands but also a word that, to some, illustrates the uncomfortable nexus of language and marketing.Ībilify is an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as other conditions (it is sometimes given for autism, for example). But it is also the language of side boob. Yes, it is still the language of Shakespeare.
Among the words recently ushered into the august Oxford English Dictionary (or at least its online counterpart) are YOLO and amazeballs. So thorough has been pop culture's assault on the English language that even the high priests of diction have ceded the inner sanctum.
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