We’re all worried about the state of our country, but the ability to discuss our problems in a reasonable and productive manner is eluding us. Part of this disability comes from the fact that (and I’m borrowing from Thomas Sowell here) half of us see life as being “constricted” (his word) by reality and the other half sees the world, sees reality, as malleable, or “unconstructed,” in spite of the pesky failures of their wishful thinking. The fact of the matter is that if we head off in diametrically opposed directions, we’re unlikely to end up next door to each other.
However, if we could talk objectively about our differences, we might, given fair winds and following seas, arrive at livable compromises. But we can’t do that without words, and too many of our most polemic words have turned to glass — fragile, unsubstantial, hard, and cold. Some are words that were created for the purpose of deception and manipulation, others are words that have morphed into their useless state through overuse, or a subtle twisting that renders them empty over time. Since the words in question are the key words in our current miasma, this is a big problem.
Language is a contract we live by. We all agree on what words mean, and yes, we do invent new words — thousands of them; we need to because we keep inventing new things. Yes, we steal words from other languages and mispronounce them until they feel like home. We shift words from one part of speech to another — “party” used to be a noun but now can be a verb likely involving illegal substances. Language always changes.
But sometimes it turns on us and this is one of those times. Our wonderful language has fallen into evil hands — hands that intend to divide and conquer, to confuse and disable, to conquer and control.
Let’s take the Left’s tactic and do a bit of dividing and conquering ourselves. Let’s organize these vampire words.
Start with words as weapons. These words are used to humiliate, to ridicule, to accuse. Words like racist, bigot, terrorist. Terrorist, which used to refer to a person willing to blow up buildings to promote a questionable ideology, now refers to parents who verbally object to the sexual grooming of their children. Racist wasn’t even in the English language until the early 1900s and even then, did not carry the negative connotation the word wields today. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the term began to sharpen into the glass shard it is today. Today racist has been turned inside out. Instead of meaning anti-black, it now means anti-white. Another ist that’s doing a backflip is Marxist. Previously negative in the extreme, it is now a badge of collegiate honor. It’s now useless to call someone a Marxist, since the Marxist would only take it as a complement. Closely connected to the ists are the isms. Capitalism, activism, nationalism — spoken with a sneer, as if these terms are deadly diseases.
https://pacificbible.edu in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at 1window45@gmail.com.
Image: RawPixel.com
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