Abebe On Language.

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.