Reach Out exceeds my grasp

I noticed it first when I was talking to a young person. Then I noticed that most young people say reach out when they really mean contact.

It drives me nuts.

The recent overuse of reach out reminds me of some people’s insistence on using the non-word ‘ginormous’ to mean really big. It’s a combination of gigantic and enormous, but what’s wrong with using gigantic or enormous? Or really big? Why do we need to slap those two words together to make a third?

And why do we need to say reach out when what we really mean is contact?

Wondering if I’m the only person who cringes when I hear the expression, I looked it up on Visualthesaurus.com. I am not alone.  From the website:

“From Bnet.com: "Every time a prospective vendor tells me they are calling to 'reach out' to me I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling them to keep their hands to themself [sic]."

“And from AskTheManager, a business blog: "The image of someone reaching out to us is more than a little creepy. ... [L]eaders should use: Contact."

But I am telling my age apparently. According to Visualthesaurus.com, ‘contact’ at one time gave people a fingernails-on-a-blackboard reaction. Back in the day, contact meant two surfaces touching each other, and applying that word to person-to-person communication was risqué, if not annoying.

But in the 1970s — the age of transactional analysis, navel-contemplating and deep introspection — reach out became widely used but had more of a sense of urgency. Remember The Four Tops song, “Reach out, I’ll be there?” It implied more than just call me. It said call me when you’re really down and out, and need some special attention.

Then AT&T came up with reach out and touch someone. Meaning contact them by telephone. Again, it implied that someone you have ignored for a while needs to hear from you. Reach out. Take a chance that person won’t hang up on you.

Those days of encounter groups, crossing social barriers and other forms of reaching out have gone the way of the Edsel. Now everyone walks around in his own little fog looking down at a cell phone and reading or writing a text. If there is any reaching out it happens when someone stumbles in a hole and tries to right himself before he falls, taking his phone with him.

Maybe that’s why young people use reach out so often — to keep from tripping while texting. Or maybe they think it’s an expression that needs to be revived because they have no idea how to communicate face to face. To them, it really does involve reaching out the way it used to be meant.

I still don’t like it.