This week’s crossword puzzle had a clue that befuddled me because what it wanted for an answer is not a real word, and the clue didn’t have a question mark on it, as is customary for an answer that stretches our understanding of synonymous relationships or is a figure-of-speech.
The clue was “emits a beam of light,” and the answer had five letters in it. I struggled with it right to the end; shines had too many letter, rays had too few. A laser emits a beam of light, but lases couldn’t be the answer, I thought, because L.A.S.E.R. is an acronym that stands for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation;” it is not a word. When I finally looked to my favorite online dictionary for its opinion, I was surprised to find an entry for lase; although the dictionary’s editors indicated that it is a back-formation from the word laser, I object to its legitimization because I know that laser came first, and I know that L.A.S.E.R. is not a word!
I suppose that if I was younger, and didn’t know that the term I commonly heard as laser was an acronym, I might argue that this is an example of evolution of the language… After all, all other forms of light radiate, or widen out in a circular manner from their point of origin, rather than maintain a (nearly) consistent diameter, so the words we used to describe light before the L.A.S.E.R. was invented, like shine and ray, might be considered insufficient to describe the highly focused beam of light emitted from a L.A.S.E.R. device.
The older me would counter that we already have words commonly used to describe L.A.S.E.R. light, and don’t need to complicate the language by adding a backwardly-derived root for a non-existent word. We commonly instruct our children not to shine their laser light toys in anyone’s eyes, and we commonly refer to L.A.S.E.R. light as a beam of light, so to say that it beams or shines is grammatically correct, and adequately describes the light emitted by a L.A.S.E.R.
The younger me makes a good point, but the older me wins by demonstrating that adding a new word to our lexicon to describe L.A.S.E.R. light is unnecessary. You wouldn’t instruct your child not to ‘lase that light in his eyes,’ would you? The crossword puzzle editor’s clue, “emits a beam of light,” was flawed because emit and beam are redundant as he used them; he may as well have written it as “emits an emission of light,” or “beams a beam of light.”
