Language evolves
“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.” – Christopher Dawson, The Judgement of the Nations
Your Editor had a discussion with a wordsmith-friend recently. Saying “We did good today,” when the work was done was met with a raised eyebrow.
“Alright, alright, we did well,” was met with a smug smile.
“Technically, we might have done good as well,” got an answer in the negative.
Not to be out-stubborned, your Editor insisted that good is also a noun. The wordsmith disagreed. Assuming his best Shakespearean tone, your Editor said “After a titanic struggle, good triumphed over evil. See? A noun.”
Puzzlement from the normally erudite wordsmith.
Which set me to thinking, “Has the concept of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as discreet nouns gone completely out of the lexicon? Am I the one out-of-step, in spite of our relative ages?
I know what you are thinking: it’s a generational thing. Nope, the wordsmith is older than your Editor.
While we might not think about it much, in the modern parlance, ‘good’ is almost always used as an adjective. A quick search of the New York Times for the word good revealed a top three that were all adjectives: a good tear-jerker, a good way, 2 good seasons left. Ditto the Wall Street Journal, yielding good credit, too good to be true, and good idea.
A consultation of my shelf dictionary yields my definition, way down the list:
2good n (bef 12c.)b (1) something conforming to the moral code of the universe.
So I am not completely off…
Then a deep dive into google ngrams, which purports to reveal the frequency of use of a word as used in all English-language books. ‘Good’, you will be proud to know, comprised 0.0531% of words written in English – up from its nadir in 1979 at 0.0236% of written words. It was really out of fashion when your editor was a kid.
Ngrams will even break out words by part of speech – and here I saw the pattern the wordsmith adhered to. In 2022, ‘good’ as a noun was only 0.00274% of written words – for a use only five percent as often as a noun as as adjective. Only one use in twenty was with my chosen meaning.
The 1979 nadir puzzled me now, as that was the era when I was learning the meanings of words and reading in earnest for the first time.
And then I discovered a new tab on ngrams - the one that allowed me to select British English, American English, or English fiction. British English revealed only minor differences and still had the (roughly) 1979 nadir of ‘good’ as a noun. But English fiction, on which I cut my lexicographical teeth, showed a nadir of ‘good’ as a noun in 2022 – the last year evaluated.
Aha!
Now I see the word’s etymology conforming to the worldview I remembered. ‘Star Wars’ came out in 1977, introducing an epic science-fiction tale of good vs. evil. Only the 2024 TV series (mercifully canceled) “Star Wars: The Acolyte” has the Jedi as not necessarily good and the Sith as not evil - just misunderstood.
The Lord of the Rings, an epic tale of good and evil, was published in 1954, when ‘good’ as a noun was used 0.00416% of the time – a rate almost twice that of 2022. Mr. Tolkien’s worldview was very binary good vs. evil.
But the heroine in the 2024 TV version, “Rings of Power,” is described by Lili Loofbourow in an August 29 Washington Post column as “morally gray,” and possessing “an explicitly genocidal desire to murder every last [orc].”
The good vs. evil fiction of the mid-20th century has become something morally gray. And thus the lexicon has followed and we no longer use “good” as a noun much in our fiction.
If statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke is correct that “fiction lags after truth,” we may be in trouble.