Grammar Nerd Wednesday: Impacted: not what you think it means.

This is part of an ongoing series of posts designed to make everyone think I'm a colossal prick because of my grammatical specificity. These posts are either me lecturing the masses about how to properly use grammar/punctuation/the rules of the English language, or me figuring out for myself, textually, the aforementioned.  They will run every Wednesday.  If you run afoul of these rules, rest assured, even though I judge you for your poor grammar, I'm still a lesser being than you.

You’re smart, right?  You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.  When you speak, it doesn’t sound like a mouth-breathing troglodyte happened upon some dictionary featuring solely monosyllabic words and utterances.  In fact, you even try to use words that mean things other words mean, but that people don’t always use, like apoplectic for angry, or elated in place of happy.  Lately, at your job, when you’re sitting in mind-numbing meetings, talking about TPS reports and synergy, you’ve been hearing your coworkers and supervisors talk about the effect certain actions have on others, they’ve been saying “impact.”  Like, when your company wants to build a slurry pond upstream from a community’s reservoir using graham crackers and squeezy cheese as building materials, they need to investigate the impact it has on the environment.

When they speak about the effects of something that has since past, they probably use the word “impacted.”  That’s common grammatical usage.  To make something plural, you ad “-ed.”  If today you fish for compliments because your ego is a fragile, hollow shell of external affirmation, then when speaking about it after the fact, you’d say, “Yesterday, I fished for compliments because I have no self-esteem and need others to validate my self-worth.”  Except that “impacted” is not the past-tense of impact, and when you hear the Associate Vice President for Community Outreach and Development use it because it sounds SUPER DUPER smart, and way more brainy than “affected” you can laugh, because of this handy-dandy little phrase:

“Only colons and molars can be impacted.  Everything else had an impact.”

Yes, while impact can be used interchangeably for affect, impacted cannot be used interchangeably for affected.  Here’s why:

Impacted is an adjective, meaning it’s a word used to describe something.  To say “That movie impacted me” means that impacted, in that sense, is a verb, an action word.  “Impacted” describes something that is wedged tightly between, or blocked by.  The reason a molar is impacted is because it is wedged between the jawbone and another tooth (gross.)  The reason a colon is impacted is because there is a hard lump of feces that is blocking your colon from passing more feces through (grosser.)

When you speak of an environmental impact study, you’re speaking of either the possible influences something might have on an area, which is the affects of building a dam across a river that would flood a small Amish farming community and ruin their entire way of life, or the outcome of something that happened in the past that is being studied, which is the effect (or result), such as, in six hundred years when humanity speaks of the environmental impact of the reliance of the human race in the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries on fossil fuels which warmed our planet so much that the polar ice caps melted and flooded our coastal metropolises, forcing us all to live in Branson, Missouri, which is the new eastern seaboard and cultural center of the world.  But, when you want to say that “The Thin Blue Line” is a major influence in your career as an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker, you shouldn’t say “’The Thin Blue Line’ impacted me, unless you worked in a warehouse full of DVD and VHS copies of “The Thin Blue Line,” and you became inextricably trapped between two large pallets of DVD copies of “The Thin Blue Line,” and no one found you for six days, at which point, you were mad with rage at having only Gene Siskel’s blurb on the back of the DVD case to read over and over and over again as a way to pass the time.  What you’re saying in the context of “’The Thin Blue Line’ impacted me as a filmmaker” is that “The Thin Blue Line” wedged you in between two things.

But, how do you impress Sandy in accounting, who is separated from her husband, and wants to play the field for a while?  Easy!  Just say “’The Thin Blue Line’ had an impact on me as a filmmaker.”  It means what you want it to mean, and it still uses the eight dollar word “impact.”  Win-win!

Of course, if you’re writing it out in an email, you might want to use the correct form of affect or effect.  That’ll make you look WICKED SMAHT! (Next time, I’ll give a quick primer on affect and effect.)