A couple of weeks back, NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a piece about the word random. It definitely was something I would be expected to like. After all, I am the NPR guy di tutti NPR guys. All the presets on my kitchen table radio are set to different public radio stations. On Twitter, I follow Steve Inskeep, Mike Pesca, David Folkenflik, and Don Gonyea. (I even know how to spell their names.) And I’m pretty interested in language as well.
But the piece was disappointing. It basically seemed to be about the fact that random has come to refer not only to an action made without deliberation or an event not following a pattern (the traditional meaning) but also, in the OED’s words, to something “Peculiar, strange; nonsensical, unpredictable, or inexplicable; unexpected.” The trouble is, that meaning has been around at least since 1988, the date of this OED citation from The New York …