It is showing up in news articles, by different reporters, so much so that I'm wondering if there is an internal website at the NYT that advises reporters on new words to use. Certainly it is being blessed by whatever role the editors are playing these days.
A long, long time ago the card store that was in the same building as the flower shop on 3rd Avenue carried the usual layout of newspapers, some magazines, candy, of course, and an array of paperbacks that always caught my eye.
On shelves over the newspapers the owner had the paperbacks of the latest bestsellers and also a wide array of the classics, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain. These all had attractive covers that resembled paintings. I think they were published by the American Library.
I bought and read many of them, particularly Steinbeck.
There was also several feet of books of many titles, by Jean-Paul Sartre that always caught my eye. They too had an attractive look. This was the 60s, and I think Jean-Paul's philosophy was big then. All I knew about it was it was Existentialism. It sounded too avant-garde for me.
In high school I distinctly remember the English teacher reading a passage aloud from Macbeth, which of course we were devoting a good part of the term to.
"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
She let it sink it for a few seconds, and then with pride told us, "You want existentialism? Try Shakespeare."
It always made an impression on me, as I liked Macbeth way more than Hamlet. It is also where my definition of existentialism was formed. So, all those books with all those titles by Jean-Paul Sartre that I see all the time can best be summed up by a few lines from Shakespeare? Works for me. I never had an interest in the Sartre books I kept seeing in the store. Never picked one up and never read Sartre at all.
Now I see the word existential used in all sorts of articles, like today's online story of the cab driver who committed suicide in front of City Hall to protest the livelihood drivers like himself were losing to the ride-hailing services like Uber. Certainly a sad story.
The article opens by recounting testimony Bhairavi Desai, the executive Director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance gave in front of the Taxi and Limousine Commission that the reporter Gina Bellafante described as evidence of the "mounting existential difficulties" facing members of the Alliance.
Certainly her testimony was prescient about how hard the drivers were being affected by the likes of Uber. And to call the hardships as "existential difficulties" does add the intended gravity to the problems. What can be worse than "existential difficulties?"
But I can't square the OED's definition of 'existential' and my own, formed so very long ago in that high school English class, with what cabbies and other driver are experiencing. It certainly is not good, but "existential?"
Certainly I'm no William Safire, or any other of the word pundits who dissect chosen words of speech, but I have to think the word is being used because it is thought to add gravity to what is being described. I'm sure the newsroom these days is likely filled with millennials who never wondered what the hell Jean-Paul was all about.
Take a recent NYT Editorial Board opinion essay on the conflict between New York's governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City's mayor, Bill de Blasio, and how it is putting the city's mass transit woes in the middle of waring parties.
After giving examples of nations that put aside their differences for a while to fight a common foe, the Editorial Board, in its second paragraph tells us:
"So is it too much to ask the mayor of New York City and the governor of New York to work together in the face of a crisis bordering on the existential for their citizens?"
Wow. Strong language right? An existential crisis is falling on all of us who take mass transit. Where's Batman? I have to tell you when I was pissed that the No. 1 train wasn't coming a few Sundays ago and I forfeited my fare and took to walking to Carnegie Hall from Penn Station, I did not think anything 'existential' was going on. I thought what was going on was that the train didn't show up. Was that because it couldn't find its inner self?
I read in other stories we are "facing an "existential threat." It sounds like it's coming from outer space and it's going to wipe us off the face of the earth. Star Wars.
Certainly Shakespeare and the Bible are two examples of literature that are not widely read these days. What the hell. Using existential in a sentence is just a fad.
And who reads Jean-Paul Sartre these days anyway?
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