Affectivity Rant Cancelled

And that’s a shame, because I was working up such a wonderful head of intellectual steam while, first, showering, and then lounging in the tub.

I’d seen the word several times during last week’s OOOevents and wondered “What the freak? What’s this ‘affectivity’ affectation? I know feelings, emotions, affection, even affect. But ‘affectivity’? Gimme a break, Sheesh. Sounds like a word coined by intellectuals who want to talk about emotions held at the end of a long stick, with clothespins over their noses to close off the, well, you know, the affectivity.”

That’s for openers. Then I was going to divert into a rant on “hybridity” as a comparable case. You know:

Whoever coined that word should be shot. For one thing, they’ve got a tin ear for the English language. It just doesn’t roll off the tongue. For another, who needs it? I understand that human cultures—the province of the word—are hybrids. But do we really need this word to talk about it? Sounds like something coined by a self-important theorist type who wants to pretend that he invented the notion. As I said, they should be shot. Or, barring that, they should be forbidden to publish in English ever again. We don’t need crap words littering the language.

Now, “affectivity” isn’t as bad, musically, as “hybridity”. It just seems to me unnecessary. And so forth and so on . . . and then I'd return to the main rant.

But then I checked the Google Ngram viewer and found out that “affectivity” has been in constant use longer than “hybridity.” That blue line is “affectivity” (the chart runs from 1910 to the present) while the red line is “hybridity.”

The latter zooms up after 1990, which is, presumably, a boost from post-colonial studies, while the former is just perkin’ along.

So, I really can’t justify a rant about the word. It’s just a tad too old and settled in. But would someone, please, tell me and why’s it showing up in humanistic studies? I mean, do people, like, think they’ve got something new going on that they’ve got to use this distancing, this ‘ivity’, word?

EEyuwww!