The podictionary word for today is impact:  I was listening the other day to Richard Lederer on NPR saying that about 10 years ago a national public radio poll found that the number one pet peeve with listeners was the use of the word impact when someone could have just as easily said affect. 

Now I know that Richard Lederer is more of a descriptionist than a prescriptionist so he won’t mind me saying that what this really means is that people have too many pet peeves.  This usage isn’t some modern degradation of the English language. 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word impact appeared in English a little before Shakespeare where its meaning was more one of sardines in a can.  The meaning of banging into something only arose in 1781, and it was only 38 years later that it was first used instead of affect.  So the object of this pet peeve has about a 200 year old pedigree.  So I say, get a life, why worry if someone uses a word in a way you wouldn’t have.  As long as you understood what they meant, isn’t that the point?   If that makes your blood boil I’m sorry. 

I call to my defense the first guy who used impact when he could have used affect he was no less than Samuel Coleridge.  You may recognize some of his work The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or  Kubla Khan.

The word impact also gives us an opportunity to understand etymology a little better because if you look it up in the OED you will notice a little asterisk beside the Latin word that it is supposed to have come from.  This is impactus and is supposed to be a participle of the root of our word “impinge”. 

The illuminating bit is that what the asterisk means is that no one has ever really come across this Latin word impactus so we can’t be absolutely sure it really was a Latin word.  It’s just that all the evidence seems to point to it.