croon

The lexis of our language is like a coral reef, full of wonders rich and strange. And, as with coral reefs, one of the threats to its diversity is bleaching.

Coral bleaching is a result of coral shedding algae due to rising sea temperatures. Semantic bleaching is a result of words shedding distinctions of meaning due to overuse, over-broad use, what one might call thesaurusitis: treating all words in a section of Roget’s as fungible. The words are still in use, but they lose much of their distinction of sense, thereby reducing the expressive power of the language. And modern electronic media can amplify this effect.

Expressive power and electronic amplification have much to do with the word of which I sing today, croon. It’s not a new word; it dates back half a millennium in Scotland and northern England, where it has for that long had the sense of a low sound, either (particularly in Scotland) a low, deep, loud, steady sound, or (more broadly) a low murmuring sound or soft quiet singing. It sounds like it should mean what it means. In singing, it’s the opposite of belting. Belting is the kind of singing you do when you have a noisy room and poor (or no) amplification. Once you have a good microphone and good speakers, you can draw the audience in with quiet, smooth singing. You can croon.

Which is what happened in jazz in the late 1920s onward. The first truly famous crooner was Rudy Vallée. His soft voice crept like a lover into millions of living rooms through the radio. Many others followed; the one probably most often thought of as a crooner was Bing Crosby. They all had a gentle, quiet singing style that worked closely with the microphone.

But as one technology giveth, another helpeth take away. Newspapers are written by people who are trained to be allergic to repetition. They seek different words for the same thing to make their prose seem more varied and expressive. We can never forget that a pumpkin is a gourd thanks to them; we are given the idea that every promise, however solemn and formal or not, is a vow; food writers talk of people munching even the softest, smoothest, quietest foods (ice cream? oatmeal?). And every act of singing may be called crooning.

It’s not that the word is always used over-broadly; it has not been utterly bleached. But a quick look through recent New York Times articles finds gospel choirs “crooning” more than once and a jazz singer who “crooned over the trio, belting the 1941 Duke Ellington classic” – yes, crooning and belting as the same act. Even non-singers, we are told, have sometimes “crooned”: soccer fans, en masse in a stadium, “crooned” “We’re not going home”; Donald Trump, at a rally, “crooned” “I love you! I love you!” to his supporters. Every one of these uses is amplified to an unlimited number of eyeballs through the wonder of the world wide web.

As a linguist, I can look at this and just write it down as instances of semantic broadening due to an evident desire for more expressive-sounding vocabulary (with the likely long-term effect of reducing the expressive value it draws on). As an editor and user of the language, however, I would rather resist it, because it ultimately reduces the expressive power. And there can be quite a lot of expressive power in the soft, quiet, focused, and amplified sound of crooning.