From a New York Times obituary for the dance teacher Martha Myers:
Ms. Myers was diminutive — the 1998 newspaper article said she described herself as “5 feet 2 inches and shrinking” — but impactful.Diminutive seems to me an odd word to apply to a person, at least as a predicate adjective. Perhaps the writer thought short pejorative?
As for impactful, Garner’s Modern English Usage calls it
barbarous jargon dating from the mid-1960s. Unlike other adjectives ending in -ful, it cannot be idiomatically rendered in the phrase full of [+ quality], as in beautiful (= full of beauty), regretful (= full of regret), scornful (= full of scorn), and spiteful (= full of spite). If impact truly denotes a quality, it does so only in its newfangled uses as a verb <it impacts us all> and as an adjective <the mechanic’s tool known as an impact driver>.One need not find the point about -ful persuasive to cringe a bit at impactful.
Whatever its future may be, *impactful is, for now, a word to be scorned. Among its established replacements are influential and powerful.
Back to the Times. How about this sentence instead?
Ms. Myers was slight of stature — the 1998 newspaper article said she described herself as “5 feet 2 inches and shrinking” — but mighty.And to remove the interruption when quoting from the article cited earlier in the obituary:
Just “5 feet 2 inches and shrinking,” as she said in the 1998 newspaper article, Ms. Myers was slight of stature but mighty.Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
[This post is no. 102 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]
