Thoughtful Vocabulary: Sentimental

Clichés are clichés for a reason (one of my favorite authors once remarked that they were “the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication”), so I’ll start this with that in mind:

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “sentimental” as:
a: marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism

b: resulting from feeling rather than reason or thought

Oddly enough, “sentimental” is never paired with feelings of extreme fear or anger, some of the most likely feelings to sway a person. So, it’s basically just the word “sappy” for people too polite to say “sappy” aloud. “The movie is earnest, yet sentimental…” means “it’s sincere, but too touchy-feely.” “She’s getting sentimental in her old age” means “she’s too much of a softie to think straight.”

I found myself wondering how we got to that back-handed definition. In my old Latin classes, I learned about the root of the word, sententia, which could be translated several ways: opinion, point of view, thought, idea, observation, even jury vote.

If I were still in college, I would turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, the best historical dictionary for our trainwreck of a language, to trace the word’s long march from Ancient Rome to semi-snide Netflix TV show descriptor. But college was a long time ago, and I don’t have any sources I trust as highly as the OED to guide me. There are lots of reasons that words change meaning over the centuries. I’ve said it before, but the word “lord” in Old English roughly translates to “the dude with the bread.”

To me, this sounds like an Age of Enlightenment bias taking hold of a word, an 18th century, “facts don’t care about your feelings” kind of snobbery. And sure, the world needs objectivity. In the Internet Age, we’ve seen what happens when people follow what they “feel” is true despite factual evidence to the contrary, and very few of them are people you would want to hang with at a block party.

But objective fact is harder to come by than most of us are willing to admit on the regular. If you’ve ever stepped foot in a philosophy class, you’ve seen how easy it is to turn some of your basic assumptions on their heads. Take the trolley problem: saving lives is noble, taking them is evil, if I let you kill one person to save 10, 100, or 1000 people when does it become morally right to kill? No one’s found a satisfactory answer. At some point, it comes down to what feels right to you.

I’m not calling on the internet to “take back” the word sentimental, but I do think it’s gotten a bad rap. Feelings, even “tender” feelings, matter. They guide our relationships, our careers, and our votes. A quote attributed to Vincent Van Gogh reads, “Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.” Not all captains are good ones, but they exist for a reason. And the people who pretend they don’t matter aren’t much fun at parties, either.