For a while "judgmental"
looked like a niche word that we needed and could use. Coined, apparently by psychologists, in
1905-10 and brought into popular use in the middle of the century, it
identified a kind of personality that "censorious" and
"hypercritical" just didn't seem to cover. We all knew people who seemed unable to sit with other people
for more than an hour without saying, after they had left, something about
their deficiencies. They were
often the same people who, after observing another culture, said something
about its inferiority.
"Judgmental" just came in there and speared them.
But "judgmental" can
also be used to identify a kind of error.
Driving through the left side of an underpass, for example. That's an error in judgment, and, if
you wanted to distinguish it, say, from an "accidental" error you
could call it "judgmental."
You could make the same call to distinguish a problem as one for judges
rather than for legislators. You
wouldn't want to do that often but, since it's suggested by the root, it's
always possible and it rides in the back of your mind.
I don't know how big a problem
that is, but it is a problem. The
root "judgment" names something we all have to have in order to
survive. We praise "mature
judgment," as exhibited by sea captains conning a cruise ship, and deplore
"immature judgment," as exhibited by teenagers at the wheel of a hot
rod. We read that the part of the
brain that handles judgment, the prefrontal cortex, is "one of the last
regions of the brain to reach maturation," exactly what our teenagers have
not reached. When they're out in
the car there's nothing we're pulling for more than judgment, and the more
quickly developed the better.
So I want my teenager to judge,
and I judge that making him capable of judging is what nature and I very much
want, and I judge that getting what we want is better for everybody than not
getting what we want, and that not judging is never an option, but my teenager
and I, in making all these judgments, can never say we're judgmental. "Judgmental" is bad.
It's a small problem, OK, but you
don't have it with "censorious" and "hypercritical." You're not pulling against the
root. And I think that unless you
get that root out you are going to get stuck. Dictionary people (who, I know, have a hard time getting
their eyes off of roots) say that "judgmental" means "inclined
to make judgments, especially moral or personal ones" (AHD). That's you as soon as you say
"driving through the left side of a blind underpass is a sign, son, of a
human deficiency" — even if you don't go on to say, "That's bad, and
you are bad."
It's bad to make moral and
personal judgments! How could
anybody ever come up with an idea that weird? Did they not notice where they were when their science
teacher told them not to make "value judgments"? Did they not see how limited that
imperative was? What did they do
as soon as they turned away from their controlled experiment?
The real pinch comes in making social
judgments. You see a culture — a
fraternity culture, a ghetto culture — that discourages achievement in school
and you say, "That culture is deficient in preparing individuals to be
successful in this society."
(See Post #77, "My culture's better than yours.") A child who, sold on that culture,
fails to get an education is, career-wise, driving through the left side of an
underpass, and you can have the same conversation with him. Yet there's that dumb word, popping up
to put you down.
And it will pop up again, every
time you try to distinguish strong and weak, well-equipped and ill-equipped,
liberating and constricting, rich and meager in a culture. You're down, brother.
That's what "judgmental"
mainly does, put people down.
Sure, some people need to be put down. You can't let bigots and racists take over the whole bar. But you've got to be
careful. If you swing a word like
"judgmental" you could knock over a lot of your friends, and maybe
take a hit yourself. It might be
safer to put it back in the closet.
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