Mind your language

Spectator, The, Aug 15, 1998 by Wordsworth, Dot

`BLAME the Ophthalmologist,' said my husband obscurely. `The inferiority complex was his fault too.' Having delivered these unhelpful remarks he returned to a catalogue of antique sigmoidoscopes and suchlike unpleasant instruments.

By `the Ophthalmologist', it turned out, he meant Alfred Adler (1870-1937), better known as a psychiatrist. He died in Aberdeen. In the same way that the appearance of charisma in English, with a new sense devised by Max Weber, can be pinned down to 1947, so the introduction of lifestyle came with the translation of Adler's Problems of Neurosis in 1929.

My husband's sibylline reference to Adler was in response to my exasperated tone in commenting on the silliness of people saying lifestyle when all they meant was way of life. It seems even sillier now I know that Adler meant by lifestyle something like 'a person's basic character as established early in childhood which governs reactions and behaviour'. If that is what it meant in 1929, though, it was not long before the precision slipped.

In 1947, so the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, Marshall McLuhan wrote, `While ostensibly setting about the freeing of the slaves, they became enslaved, and found in the wailing self-pity and crooning of the Negro the substitute for any lifestyle of their own.' Be that as it may, lifestyle in that quotation seems to be tending towards `way of life' rather than `basic character'.

The reason, though, that we, or at least I, find lifestyle so thoroughly obnoxious is that it has been taken up by shallow relativists who think for some reason that one set of habits is as good as another. I find it alarming that the nice Mr Blair, who seems keen enough to introduce a notion of moral responsibility into his political economy, should be surrounded by people in the thinktank Demos who suppose that in our brand-new interconnected world we may just reinvent ourselves at will with a set of values chosen from the shelf in order to knit our chosen 'lifestyle'.

Nothing that I say is going to stop lifestyle being widely used. Naturally it will be used most often by yoghurt salesmen and gym-instructors to suggest a trivially attractive collection of fashionable characteristics. Perhaps the only person I can possibly stop using lifestyle is Veronica, and then only in my presence. In the meantime my only small triumph has been to hide my husband's instrument catalogue under a pile of Horse and Hound while he was fetching another bottle of whisky.

Dot Wordsworth