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Some time ago I received one of those insipid and banal email forwards full of “strange” things about our language; the “Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?” sort of drivel. But this one had an entry that annoyed me significantly. It asked, “If price and worth mean the same thing, how come priceless and worthless are opposites?”
There are several levels to complain about here. First is the fact that, no, price and worth are not synonymous. This is true even before we venture deeply into the moral and aesthetic realms. Worth expresses the concept of the collected attributes of an object that renders something desirable; price refers to “the amount, as of money or goods, asked for or given in exchange for something else” (American Heritage Dictionary.) The reason worth and price can seem synonymous on the surface is what I will call the “appraisal effect”. If an appraiser tells you that a painting is “worth” $150,000, this is linguistic shorthand for “this painting possesses a collection of attributes such that, were you to price it at $150,000 or less, someone would likely buy it; but if you were to price it over $150,000 no one would likely buy it.” This is admittedly efficient and useful shorthand, but like so many other linguistic shorthands it is only appropriate if we keep in mind the true meaning.
If one does not keep in mind this distinction, or if the distinction never occurs to one to begin with, what is implied?
- Pricing is optimal in terms of information dispersal; i.e. markets are efficient,
- all value judgments are based on financial analysis,
- and (implicitly) something cannot be with price but without worth, or with worth but with price.
Point one excludes bargains and price gauging from possibility; there would never be a situation where anything were priced higher or lower than what it should be on a global economic scale. But even globally efficient markets would not imply synonymy between price and worth, since point two excludes any other criteria from the definition of worth. This strikes me as slimily and naïvely capitalistic: everything I own is worth only what people will pay me for it; likewise for everyone I know. Point three, if points one and two have not convinced you, should show that the construction reduces to a logical absurdity.
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