I read somewhere recently of a Soho artist who was a ‘prolific drinker’. The meaning is clear, but hasn’t the word been taken for a walk too far from the neatly hedged semantic field where it was bred?
Prolific is hardly ever used in the literal sense of ‘producing many offspring’. I had thought it was most often employed metaphorically of authors, but then my husband surprised me by saying something both true and relevant: that prolific is most often paired with goalscorer. He’s right. It is used dozens of times a week in the sports pages. ‘Adam Rooney,’ the Times notes, ‘is undoubtedly the most prolific of Aberdeen’s strikers.’
When the same paper begins a report, ‘A male nurse has been identified as the most prolific serial killer in modern German history’ by killing 30 patients, is it straining the metaphor? Far from begetting life, the man snuffed it out.
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