True meaning of ‘act’ and all its related words

The adjective actionable presupposes the existence of the verb “to action”. But I am not aware of this verb. I know only the verb “to act”, which is what gives us the adjective active, which is what spawns the verb to activate. To activate, then, is to cause to be active, for instance, to put a machine to work.

The question is thus ineluctable: Does the adjective actionable mean the same thing as the adjective active? Quite clearly, that is not so.

At face value, actionable seems to mean “capable of being put to work”, whereas active means “actually working”. But on page 6 of the August 17 number of the Sunday Nation, we read: “Maj-Gen Gichangi is said to have fallen on his sword after it turned out that the intelligence supposed to prevent the attacks and save lives was not ‘actionable and reliable’.”

The statement has a number of other semantic problems. In particular, however, what can the reporter mean by the word “actionable”? Does he perhaps mean “active” or “capable of being activated”?

In any case, how can an activity be both “actionable and reliable” simultaneously? If it is reliable, why should anybody want to take you to court for it?

The answer is that the person who made the above statement was guilty of a misnomer, namely, an incorrect or unsuitable word for a person, thing or concept.

By the adjective “actionable”, both the speaker and the person reporting him apparently mean “feasible”, “practicable”, “capable of being implemented”, “suitable for action”, suchlike. Unfortunately, for them, the adjective actionable has long been technicalised by and now belongs only to the juridical world.

There, “actionable” has come to mean — as my dictionary puts it — “giving grounds for legal action.” Any act or statement is actionable if it can lead another party to take you to court for it. All our libel cases are actionability suits, suits which arise from the publication of something which unjustly damages a person’s reputation.

But its actionability lies only in the counter-claim that the damaging statement was cooked up, wilful, malicious and impossible of proof. The last one is the nitty-gritty. If you use a public medium — a mass rally, a pulpit, a newspaper, radio, TV, etc. — to call a public person a thief, say, he can take you to court and come away with millions in “damages” unless you produce documents against him.

Actually, then, as a definition of the adjective active, there is a whiff of tautology in the phrase “actually working”. For the element “act” in the adverb actually lends it the significance of “really”, “in truth”, “existing” and even “at work”. Really and truly, a thing is actual only if it is real and, for human beings, functioning and can be put to use.

Thus all related words containing the element act — including such others as acting, activist, actuality, actuate — imply not only existence but also function and life. Yes — William Wordsworth notwithstanding — to exist is to be alive.

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