Late in 2015, I started tutoring an undergraduate student who was studying education and creative writing. She had employed me to help her better organise her academic writing with the aim of raising her grade for her final dissertation. The first piece of work I helped her with was her proposal and this contained the word relatable. Despite my own extensive reading, I had not seen this word before but the meaning was clear enough – able to relate to. Since I was engaged in a high level and high stakes proofreading activity, I felt that I ought to check that it is a real word so I Googled it (relatable definition) and sure enough, the definition appeared listed in numerous dictionaries. I therefore, accepted the word and carried on with my proofreading.
I was somewhat astonished when the paper came back with the marking tutor’s commentary and discovered that ‘not a word‘ had been written next to the word relatable. I advised the student not to use the word since it may impact on her grade and then, as we discussed this further, my astonishment rapidly changed to alarm. On what basis was the tutor being so prescriptive? It is actually a very serious issue for a tutor to declare that a word is not a word, especially perhaps an academic who is lecturing in the field of literacy and writing education. The problem is that this tutor is operating against the findings of research in his/her own field – research that strongly indicates that the criteria to determine whether a word is or is not a word is its usage. That is how lexicographers decide which new words to include in the dictionaries, and to do otherwise is to deny the reality that language use changes over time. Not only does the way language is used change over time, but the kinds of language deemed acceptable or unacceptable change according to the social context (e.g. think about the words that are considered inappropriate over dinner or compare a conversation in a pub to one in a hospital or a job interview). Therefore, to be academically accurate, the most the tutor could claim is that relatable is inappropriate or unacceptable in the context of an academic paper in that department, or even that it is simply unacceptable to that particular individual tutor.
A few months later, I received a batch of exam papers to mark and the word relatable was everywhere! I therefore supposed that it is a relatively new word and did a little research. Sure enough, another simple Google search confirms that other educators have noticed a recent surge in usage amongst high school and college students and I uncovered a useful article on The Origins of ‘Relatable’ in The New York Times.
Having argued that relatable is a word and that the tutor was wrong to claim that it isn’t, I would like to make it clear that there are good reasons for avoiding it in academic writing. This is because an academic is interested in the details not just the broad claim that something is relatable. What factors contribute to making a given phenomena relatable? Perhaps we could think of this as its relative relatableness or relatability – am I inventing new word forms and stretching the use of this word too far? Anyhow, my brief Google-based research turned up a useful article on The Awful Emptiness of “Relatable”, which helpfully highlights some of the problems using it in an academic paper.
Finally, I will end with the observation that the spell-checker in the WordPress blogging framework I am using to write this post does not recognise the word relatable and every use above has a wiggly red line below it 😮