It sounds bad to say you have a psychological problem, but at least it comes off as more serious than having a pet peeve. One of my pet peeves/psychological problems is that when people use the word “closure” for anything other than a sense of resolution, it makes me want to scream.
As an editor, instead of screaming, I change what I deem to be misuse of the word to something that backs me away from a breakdown: in almost every case, “closing.”
It’s not that “closure” is necessarily wrong when discussing something that closes. Dictionaries and experts approve the term when it represents finality: a business shutting down forever as opposed to locking its doors until a shift arrives to open them the next workday.
In my loser of an argument, though, I don’t just object; I follow lieutenant commander JoAnne Galloway in announcing that I strenuously object. (It didn’t work for her in Aaron Sorkin’s “A Few Good Men,” either.) “Closure” is too strongly associated with a feeling rather than an easily understood action for me to ever accept its use. It’s better to be clear than ambiguous, and I don’t understand why the rest of the world seems to embrace the use of a word that reads like something else.
“A 400-year-old tea and coffee shop faces closure in Amsterdam,” CNN reports. (That seems nice, right? Good for it.) “Trump Calls Directly for Closure of U.S.A.I.D.,” The New York Times says. (Donald, people must come to this in their own time. But never will.) Locally, we saw the closing last year of the adult boutique Hubba Hubba, Hilton’s Tent City, Anthropologie and a bunch of Starbucks locations, but I don’t know if employees have found closure.
Hey, can we shop at your store? No, it’s closured. We closured it. It’s been closured.
I once got brutally cussed out by a reader for using the term “eatery” – apparently her pet peeve. She should take some satisfaction in knowing that the New Oxford American Dictionary I refer to frequently, while it affirms that word as informal but legitimate, uses this sentence as an example of use: “The popular eatery was under threat of closure.” Ugh.
Psychologically, we warm up to things more when we encounter them a lot – as long as we don’t already dislike them. It’s called the mere exposure effect. But pet peeves? “Just like physical allergens, repeated exposure can intensify our responses over time,” wrote Harry Cohen in a 2024 piece in Psychology Today. They can supposedly trigger the same flight or flight response as, well, real things.
In me, it’s always fight, and when I see a “closure” that forces us to shop online or find another source of rubber underpants (or whatever), I always choose the word that can’t be mistaken for what you hope to find after the death of a loved one.
This is an open-and-shut case. And by “shut” I mean …
Reach out via mlevy@csindie.com.
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