“Perfect”
Saturday, April 26th, 2008A few months ago, I attended a meeting at which the group leader used the word “perfect” in the following way: Accept yourself as you are, for you are perfect; do not worry about the past, for the past is perfect.
I cringed.
Tonight, on the Science Fiction Channel’s program Battlestar Galactica, one of the characters, Gaius Baltar, gave what was supposed to be an inspirational speech to a group of followers in which he reasoned as follows: God would not love you if you were imperfect; but God does love you. This is God’s truth: You are all perfect!
Again, I cringed.
When did “perfect” begin to be misused and abused this way? The speaker at my meeting meant something like, “Accept yourself as you are; love yourself as you are. Do not kick yourself or get down on yourself or overcriticize yourself for your flaws; human beings are imperfect, and you’re an imperfect human being, and that’s OK. Accept the past as it is; it is unchangeable, and worrying about it won’t help anyone at all, least of all yourself. Just accept it, and move on to doing what’s best and most constructive in the future.” (I might have embellished her meaning a bit, but the gist of it is not to worry about either your flaws or the past, but just to love yourself and be loving now and in the future.) “You are perfect” is not the same as “You should accept yourself as you are.” Nor is “You should accept yourself as you are” synonymous with “You shouldn’t do anything to try to improve yourself.” “Perfect” means “beyond any conceivable improvement.” There are conceivable ways in which anyone could be a better person—if only by knowing one more language than he already knows, or by learning how to use the word “perfect”—and there are conceivable ways in which the past could be better than it was. “You are perfect” does not mean “You are worthy of love,” as Gaius Baltar seems to have used it to mean.
Why must people misuse and abuse a good English word? Such misuse and abuse just makes it harder for people to communicate clearly with each other.
The truly annoying thing is that it’s usually nice people using the word for noble purposes, trying to help people feel good about themselves and to stop being overly critical of themselves, who do this. One wants to say, “I agree with your sentiment, but you need to express it differently.” But, as I discovered at that meeting, not everyone understands what he’s doing wrong, even when it’s pointed out by more than one person, as was done then; the two of us were just categorized as “logical people”—as though being logical were optional! As though logic were a hobby some people pursued but that other people were free to simply ignore.
This Humpty Dumpty language use, in which words mean whatever one wants them to mean, only ends up leading to confusion and to the acceptance of unjustified doctrines. You get fuzzy thinking. You get relativism and subjectivism and postmodernism. (In a related vein, I’m reminded of a joke I just read: What do you get when you cross a Mafioso and a postmodernist? You get someone who makes you an offer you can’t understand.) And, ultimately, you change the meaning of the word, and then a new word needs to be coined to express the old concept. I can only shake my head and wonder why this happens.