ktschwarz reminds me that the NY Times has rebooted On Language:
Written memorably by William Safire for most of its run, the original column was a mainstay of the magazine for 32 years until 2011. Now that social media, online communities and contemporary political discourse are transforming language profoundly — and these new grammars and vocabularies are flowing into large language models that, slowly but surely, are becoming a dominant force — we think it’s high time to bring the column back. The primary writer will be Nitsuh Abebe. His first column published earlier this week, on the word “lethality.” That follows a string of great columns Nitsuh has written in recent months about the em-dash, the neologism “cope,” the suffix “-maxxing” and the reluctance people have to use periods in texts.
I had actually planned to write about it last week, but that “lethality” essay (archived) annoyed me by being so focused on the news of the day. The new one (archived), on “agentic,” is more to my taste, paying greater attention to word history:
There are various reports and they all seem to agree: The tech world is currently awash in the concept of agency. It is, more specifically, extremely into the word “agentic,” which peppers the language of the tech-associated, the tech-adjacent, the tech-adjacent-adjacent.
That’s “agentic” as in, you know, having agency — possessing the capacity “to influence and control outcomes through assertive individual action,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. The word holds a lot of meaning in computing, but Silicon Valley aspirants seem just as eager to apply it to themselves. They talk about being agentic people; sometimes they dress up the idea in a little rhetorical suit and talk about the Highly Agentic Individual. They are describing the kind of person who simply acts, assertively, to shape the world, rather than seeking approval or meekly following the herd. Candidates for tech jobs get asked if they’re agentic (good) or mimetic (yuck). On X, people debate whether the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is in fact “the most agentic person alive.” One poster laments the way a cold can ruin your workday: “You won’t make any deals, you won’t be an agentic person. You’re milquetoast.” Another just needs an adequately agentic aide to help schedule medical appointments.
This sense of agency is hundreds of years old: That O.E.D. entry — II.4, “Ability or capacity to exert power” — features citations from the year 1606 onward, concerning things like “the moral Agency of the Supreme Being” versus that of humanity, or the state’s role in preserving the “personal free agency” of its citizens. But you could be forgiven for thinking it feels new, given how much our understanding of it has been shaped by recent thinking in psychology. In that field, agency is the ability to act independently and, by doing so, to feel control over your own direction — steering your fate instead of watching helplessly as life happens to you. (Children, for instance, are said to gradually develop more “agency and autonomy” as they grow.) Readers of things like feminist criticism will have watched a related usage bubble up from academic thought (1988: Unlike depictions of “women as victims of forces beyond their control,” Emma stands as “Austen’s most agentic heroine”) and eventually cross into everyday speech. […]
Most Americans remain more connected with a different meaning of “agent.” We’re used to the agent as representative — someone who acts on behalf of. Talent agents negotiate deals for actors, writers, models. Travel agents book vacation packages for tour groups. Customer-service agents appear, if you’re lucky, after a minute or two of wearily declaiming the word “AGENT” into a speech-recognition phone system.
The word’s etymology contains both strains: the agent as actor, yes, but also as advocate, instrument, emissary. That double meaning is incredibly handy for the tech industry. It can sound as though agentic A.I. models are meant to assist us — even when the people using the word are boasting that their models are just fine acting without us.
I had actually been wondering what all those people meant by “agentic,” so I’m glad to have it explained, and of course I’m glad the NYT has revived the column.
Naturally the thing that most interested me about Nitsuh Abebe was his name. Sadly, I can find nothing to shed any light on this at all.
Yes, I was wondering about that as well.
Wikipedia lists various people of Ethiopian ancestry with Abebe as either a given name or a surname (from a patronymic, apparently). And some random website that’s not obviously fraudulent says that Nitsuh is a transliteration of the (epicene) given name ንጹህ .
Whatever his ancestry, however, Mr. Abebe is so well-assimilated into American society as to have perfectly mastered the rhetorical register of a particular style of writing about rock music that is sometimes deprecated by soreheads as stereotypically white-and-nerdy, as seen by his authorship of the impressive compound phrase “angular guitar attacks, odd skronks, jazzy tones, and a generally deconstructive approach.”
Amharic?
ንጹህ:
Make of that what you will.
The only Amharic names I can ever spot are the ones nicked from Ge’ez, like Haile Selassie.
ንጹህ is “clean, pure”, apparently:
https://dictionary.abyssinica.com/%E1%8A%95%E1%8C%B9%E1%88%85
Fair enough.
So “Catherine/Innocent.” Depending.
[Ninja’d by Hat]
Abebe Bikila is a famous one (to me).
In ancient times, i.e. ten years ago when I was working in Washington D.C., the essential thing was to be pro-active, which as far as I can tell means pretty much the same as agentic. Except one is east coast and the other is west coast, therefore worlds apart.
Programming used to have to be “agile.” I think that was before it became “vibe.”
Agile Programming is a specific thing, in principle. But as the article says “The increasing adoption of agile practices has also been criticized as being a management fad that simply describes existing good practices under new jargon, promotes a one-size-fits-all mindset towards development strategies, and wrongly emphasizes method over results.” That is what I assume it really is.
ktschwarz reminds me that the NY Times has rebooted On Language
I almost didn’t catch that.
Abebe Bekila is also famous to me.
Is Abebe the same as in Addis Abeba, i.e. አበባ “flower”?
Wikipedia knows a decent list of (mostly) Ethiopians named Abebe or what I assume is variant forms, be it cognates in related languages or different romanisations.
Programming used to have to be “agile.” …
That is sooo decade before last.
These days AI writes programs, so there’s nobody responsible for “practitioners value”s any more. Increasingly, it’s apparent that Claude’s code is the very opposite of Agile — indeed almost unmaintainable. Expect that once Claude has picked all the ‘low-hanging fruit’ (a jargon term that sits right beside ‘proactive’), programmers (if there’s any left by then) will declare Claude’s code obsolete and have to rewrite it all. So halting any systems evolution as happened around Y2K.
@David L: Back in an earlier life, i.e. c. 1990, I had the misfortune to work in a WalMart in California. It was largely a miserable experience, but I was delighted one day when the store manager gathered us around to eagerly propound the wisdom from some meeting or seminar he had attended. Our problem, he explained, was that we were too proactive and needed to be more reactive. He had learned a new (to him) buzzword, but had gotten it backwards. Fortunately I was standing in the back of the group, as I had difficulty not bursting into laughter.
The “reboot” appears to include a switch from a serif to a sans serif typeface. How very 1980s chic!
Stanley Arthur Morison would not be pleased.
The Arabic cognate to ንጹህ is نصوح naṣūḥ, which I think I’ve only ever heard in one fixed phrase of Quranic origin: tawbatan naṣūḥan “with sincere repentance”. It doesn’t relate in any immediately obvious way to the primary sense of the root, “advise”; you would expect the meaning “someone who gives lots of advice”, which apparently is also a possible sense of the word. That makes me suspect that, in this sense, it may be a loanword from Ge`ez rather than an Arabic-internal formation.
Edit: al-Qurtubi lists 28 possible interpretations of the precise meaning of naṣūḥ here, starting with “irreversible” and “sincere”.