2 AM language rant

[omorka]

Okay, I hereby banish the word "overachiever" from the English language.

It makes no freaking sense at all. An underachiever is achieving less than s/he is capable of. By definition, then, an overachiever is achieving more than s/he is capable of. Um, hello? That's physically impossible, ne?

It's used to denigrate the achievements of those who work hard, usually women or girls but sometimes young men as well. (No one ever uses it to describe a male over 30.) Look, if someone with less talent than you works her heart out and achieves a higher goal than you, with your greater innate ability does, that doesn't mean she's an overachiever; it means either you're an underachiever, or the two of you have different goals. Stop hanging a negative label on other people because they make you look bad by working hard with less raw talent.

Comments

[kansas-dave.livejournal.com]

I think underachieve and overachieve are relative to expectations, not capability. If they were relative to capability then overachieve would be useless, and underachieve would apply to everyone capable of anything.

[kansas-dave.livejournal.com]

In my line of work, overachieve is always complimentary. Who uses it to denigrate?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I don't think I've ever heard it used positively; it's usually used to downplay the abilities or talents of the person being described, who (as I mentioned in the post) is usually young or a woman or both.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

I use that word to refer to the sort of extreme/borderline unhealthy behavior that one often sees when parents try to live vicariously through their children. The sort of people who join service clubs because it looks good on their college applications, not because they want to help people. The ones who play the system by taking as many TA and office assistant slots as they can so their GPAs won't be lowered by those pesky 4-point electives. Then they complain because they're ranked 20 out of 600 in their class because only the top 15 get to sit on the stage during graduation. Or better yet, the one year maybe 15 of them wanted the school to pay for their useless IB tests, which meant nothing because they'd *already been accepted into the ivy league school of their choice*, instead of, oh, a hundred or so new textbooks. Or they get elected to the student council just so they can say they've demonstrated "leadership", then sit on their asses all year.

No, I'm not bitter. Honest. :-p But I'm a little surprised that you'd be so fond of them, since so many are far more concerned about trivialities like rank and GPA than what they're actually learning. It's not that they're working hard, it's what they're working hard *for*.

Would "resume whore" be a more acceptable term?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, those are "GPA whores," and they're usually not the people I hear described as "overachievers" - as you point out, often they don't achieve very much, signing up for things to pad their resumes and then not actually doing any work in them. (Although being an "overachiever" as I usually hear it used and a GPA whore can overlap; jenny_doodle qualifies on both counts.)

And at our school, office aide is a 4-pointer and the GPA whores avoid it like crazy. :)

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

I think your usage differs from the common usage. The main connotation of "overachiever" is "unhealthy", and the reason overachievers are annoying is that if you choose to be healthy and do other things than schoolwork, you come out looking worse on college applications. Since education is supposed to be more than a numbers game, this isn't good.

*lightbulb* Overachievers are like campers.

Oh, and the overachievers I saw in high school(mostly female, like you say) weren't "low-ability" people working hard, they were "high-ability" people trying to claw their way to the top of a competitive stack.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

*shrug* I agree with you that the connotation of the word is that it's unhealthy, and that's one of the primary reasons I want it banished. I am utterly incensed that simply working hard at something is considered unhealthy, by anyone. My primary gripe with gifted ed as it is currently practiced is that it is assumed that anyone who has to work isn't truly intelligent, and that's simply not true. In fact, I believe that a program that lets anyone of any ability level get by without learning how to work hard on a regular basis has failed those kids quite badly.

How many of those GPA-whore girls, if you had asked them. would have responded "oh, no, I'm not smart; I have to work really hard"? How many of them might have needed those extra few points to earn a scholarship that would allow them to pay for that Ivy-League education? (That's the case for the majority of the GPA-whores at my school, and despite y'all's higher SES level, I'm willing to bet that not everyone there could afford to pay for Yale out-of-pocket.) I agree that GPA whoring is a bad thing, but it's unfortunately something that is demanded by the system. Blaming wholesale those who choose to play the system rather than the game is, IMHO, slightly churlish.

At any rate, most of the people to whom I'm referring aren't active GPA whores, although some of them are. In fact, the inciting incident for this post wasn't educational at all; it was that Adrenalin Addicts Anonymous manifesto you posted last night, in which (IIRC) it referred to the genuine altruists, not the driven workaholics.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

Well of course they have to work hard...for their perfect GPAs. :-p

The GPA whores I knew were mostly smug, arrogant, and whiny. I have no way of knowing how "intelligent" most of them were, especially with the way they played the system. During English classes we would have group discussions, and it was quite apparent who was thinking for themselves and who was just repeating things the teacher had said a few days before. One time I came up with a fairly novel thing to talk about(a couple other people told me they thought so, anyway), and when I said it to the group, we got maybe four sentences about it before the GPA whores were back to rehashing thesis/antithesis/synthesis, or whatever tired talking point hadn't been done yet.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

To me, an overachiever is one who seeks success in a particular venue at the cost of all else. It doesn't matter if this is due to parental vicarious ambition or personal drive. An overachiever has no time for beauty, for friendship, for recreation; everything in their life is weighed in the balance of their need to "get ahead."

It may or may not be a good thing to achieve more than you'd normally be capable of. The question is, at what cost?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Again, that's not how I commonly hear it used. The most common usage I've heard is either for a student who is not identified-gifted who chooses to take upper-level classes and has to work very hard to keep up, or for an adult woman who has a job (whether part-time or full-time), a family with children, and an outside interest or volunteer position, whose activities inconvenience her husband or appear to be causing her "stress."

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

That would be because you're a teacher, and are confronted with the word only as it applies to your students or the parents you may or may not be fortunate enough to see.

From here (and I speak without experience) it seems like the school system you work in has an active prejudice against success, or at the very least against those who would rise above their assigned station in life. I have my beliefs on why this is, but those are almost certainly unprovable and definitely irrelevant.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

The US school system in general, not just my district or even the state of Texas, has a prejudice against excellence. It's because I suffered from that in Mississippi (until finally escaping to a high school that was quite frankly elitist, and thank the gods for that) that I decided to work in the public schools in the first place.

At any rate, as I mentioned in one of my other responses, the incident that prompted the post wasn't educational at all; it was a particularly enraging bit of psychobabble for/by/about Adrenalin Addicts Anonymous, in which the word was used to refer to those people, mostly women, who spend their free time on altruistic pursuits. I do read things outside the immediate domain of education, too. ;)

[fionnghal.livejournal.com]

I think you are misunderstanding the common usage of the word. I have always seen it as someone who simply put, works too hard. It really has nothing to do with capability. It has every thing to do with how obsessed they are in their job.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. "Obsessed" is the word -- and the only reason it isn't applied to men over 30 who are equally obsessed is that this is part of the corporate culture, which is where they tend to wind up.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

"Workaholic" is the more common word to describe that condition, too.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Actually it's precisely those people I think of when I use the word.

[kansas-dave.livejournal.com]

... which is probably why it isn't a bad thing in my world.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

To me, that's a "workaholic" (as someone else in the thread points out), which is also the word that gets used for males over 30.

One of my earlier comments in the thread mentions the most common usages of the word I encounter - but in the education field, it always either explicitly or implicitly compares the perceived ability level of the student with her (or his) output. It's very often used to tell girls (or their parents) who are in upper-level classes and working very hard that they're not gifted, that these classes are too hard for them (obviously, because they're actually having to work), and they'd be better off in a lower-level class that's more suited to their "actual ability level."