h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There’s been an increasing trend in English usage to change the meaning of the word ‘adequate’. Now, I’m not suggesting we should try to stop this - I don’t believe in engineering the language - and in any case, I suspect it’s probably too late now.

‘Adequate’ is a fine old word deriving from the Latin ‘adaequatus’, meaning ‘made equal to’. Up until quite recently this was binary. If something met our needs, we described it as ‘adequate’. We would even say ‘perfectly adequate’, although this is somewhat tautologous.

In its purest sense, it’s a term used in logic. You can describe a concept as adequate if it fully and exactly represents its object. Definitions are adequate if they declare all the facts.

More commonly, it’s used in a similar way to the word ‘sufficient’. “The hospital had an adequate supply of snake venom antidote”, for example. If you’d been bitten by a cobra, then you’d surely be reassured by that statement.

However in its more modern sense, ‘adequate’ describes something which falls short. It implies something barely meets the requirement. It’s probably even weaker than the word ‘satisfactory’ in this respect. You might even qualify it by saying ‘adequate at best’.

Something which has accelerated the demise of the word is the satisfaction survey. These are popularly used by street canvassers as well as by online applications. If you need to rate something then you might be given options like ‘excellent’, ‘very good’, ‘good’, ‘adequate’ and ‘poor’. Adequacy has shifted to the lower half of the scale.

So why has this happened? I’m a believer that language will always fulfil a need, so maybe we just needed a word that was somewhere on the lower half of the scale, and ‘adequate’ happened to suit. Yet I’m more inclined to think that it reflects not only our changing expectations, but also our inability to specify what is sufficient or satisfactory.

There’s something ideal about sufficiency and satisfaction - they meet our needs, yet don’t waste any effort or cost in overdelivery or overachievement. In industrial process terms, they’re ‘Lean’. Surely they are the levels we should strive to operate at.

Maybe one day we will value the sufficient and the satisfactory, but if there’s one thing for sure, we will not for much longer be calling it ‘adequate’. It’s another casualty on the battlefield of lexical fashion.

Just one final thought, if ‘adequate’ is the new ‘inadequate’, then what does ‘inadequate’ mean?

[Amy P]

It's not a new phenomenon. As far back as Shakespeare's King Lear, the king asked his daughters how much they loved him. He was outraged when Cordelia only loved him as much as a daughter should. Her love was only adequate.

"Adequacy is the hallmark of great journalism."

http://youtu.be/WOxpuKXhlss

When you say 'only adequate' I think you're setting the context that you expected something greater. These days, you can do the same without the qualification.

" in its more modern sense, ‘adequate’ describes something which falls short. It implies something barely meets the requirement." [Icy North]


Surely "inadequate" would be far worse if you were talking about one of life's necessities. The oxygen levels on top of Mt. Everest are inadequate, so you will eventually die if you stay there unoxygenated for long enough. People starve when they get inadequate food. That sort of thing.

But as a society, we have gone far past the subsistence level in most things. We can be choosy, and paying more for better stuff is the norm. But ask the customer who has to shop at the Dollar Store to make ends meet if adequacy is a bad thing.

In my job, adequate is still just in the top of the scale we use, but it isn't considered as good as good, so people who are adequate are expected to do better next time.

*adequate is still just in the top half of the scale we use