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Quote of the Day: Words
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.” – Lewis Carroll
I use words to make my living, both as an engineer and a writer. For me at least, it is important that words have accepted meanings. They can share several meanings. (Mean, for example can mean a statement of the meaning of a word or phrase, a description of something with poor, shabby, or inferior quality or status, or a middle point between extremes. It depends on the context, but if you know the context, you understand the meaning.) Words can change meanings. (He plays a mean trumpet, for example is a compliment, extrapolated from another meaning of the word.) But the change should not be arbitrary.
Yet today we live in a sea of arbitrarily changed meanings. We cannot use “field” anymore because it is racist. (Please substitute “practicum.” It isn’t even a good substitute, but at least it is not racist It is also polysyllabic which underscores the intellectual superiority of the user – and appalls the writer in me.) Or suddenly a word means the opposite of what its original meaning was. (“Tolerant” comes to mind – which has somehow morphed from reluctantly accepting to wholeheartedly approving and affirming.) I am sure you can think of others. (Feel free to add examples in the comments.)
The question is why? My feeling is it is an intentional attempt to detach people from the ideal there is objective truth. As the county song states, “You have to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.” To stand for something, there has to be objective truth. Arbitrarily changing word meanings is a great start in the goal of chipping away the foundation of objective truth.
I’ll close with advice from Roger Scruton: “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” Push back on attempts to arbitrarily change the meaning of words. I recommend mockery. It is highly effective. That of course is why the downhill slide started with the emphasis on feelings and the creation of safe spaces. It takes mockery off the table. Mock that, too.
Published in Group Writing
Indeed. This is true of most post-modernists, as well.
Mockery works. There are few things which more annoy those who insist that their own ideas are sacrosanct than when we laugh at them. All you have to do is look at their faces when we do.
Someone after my own heart.
It’s the wind beneath my wings.
“I offended you? Not yet I haven’t.”
I’ve been reading about propaganda in the Hitler era, and I was struck by the ways that Wokespeak functions the way “Heil Hitler” did back then. People who persisted in saying “Good Morning” were punished in various ways, ranging from raised eyebrows to a Brownshirt beat-down. Avoiding the phrase was more trouble than it was worth, and so more and more people went along with what amounted to an affirmation of a very specific loyalty, uttered multiple times every day.
Etiquette now, apparently, requires the careful use of nonsensical pronouns (e.g. “they/them” for a single human being) when speaking aloud, but the occasions for doing this remain relatively limited outside of academia and other enclaves of the loonier left. But being expected to append one’s own pronouns to emails has been normalized, and I believe it has the “Heil Hitler” effect. The vast, vast majority of earnest schoolteachers, counselors, college students, blue state government apparatchiks and overeducated coffee baristas will be, naturally, “he/him” or “she/her.” But every email sent and received with these unsurprising pronouns nonetheless functions as a political and ideological statement, an affirmation of one plank in a political/ideological platform. Failure to provide pronouns will be punished. A threat of actual violence is not required; Most people will mindlessly conform to truly idiotic social norms to avoid even minor social embarrassment.
For those spent any time in proximity to Mayor Pete’s world, mockery is one thing he greatly fears.
“Liberal.”
So now we have to use the term “classic liberal” to be clear.
(Which also has a side effect of reminding the listener that we have to do this because the meaning of the word has flipped.)
Orwell described exactly why.
Duckspeak:
“Doubleplusgood duckspeak”. Handy phrase.
Huh? Because some halfwit “studies” professor decided to make up an etymology having to do with slaves working in a field? Or what?
The goal is to control speech.
The rest is a semi-believable excuse.
Here’s the field thing.
Nearly severed both retinas from the eye-rolling.
What must it be like to be an older black person nd read this kind of [redact]?
I am not making reference to the electric and the magnetic practica. Practicums. Whatever.
(Isn’t using Latin some form of discrimination? Anti-Parthian, maybe?)
University of Southern California. That figures. All that sunshine has baked their wee brains.
There are so many examples. “Homeless person” (itself a euphemism) is now a “person experiencing homelessness.” Instead of funerals, we have celebrations of life (I applaud the sentiment, but not the banning of the F word). I have been desensitized to “sex worker” listening to true-crime podcasts, but delight when some plain-spoken cop actually says “prostitute,” which formerly was the polite word for the profession.
I could go on all day. But I’m trying to give up outrage.
Can I say field trip anymore? Or is trip ablist? Talk about new definitions, this is a new word that even the internet has trouble spelling.
I knew a farmer…
…he was outstanding in his field.
I knew a weird physicist…
…he was attracted to magnetic fields.
Baseball will never be the same.
Yeah. You’ll have to cover deep left practicum. And I suppose you have to leave right practicum empty, because everyone knows the right is eee-vil.
Imagine folks who tried using bribes to get their kids into USC.
My father’s family were cotton pickers so subsidize their tenant farming. That is only half a step up from white trash. They were people who picked cotton in the 30s and 40s. Dad started at 8. My grandfather expected him to pick as much as any man by then. Of course, Granddaddy kept the pay.
To Dad’s family, “cotton picker” was a not necessarily a term of endearment but it wasn’t a slur either. It was commonly used nearly every day. Those of us who grew up in the 60s-7os never used it outside our immediate families. I should add that my DNA is whiter than Wonder Bread.
Imagine my German mother using it to tell a woman of color to turn down that cotton-picking music on MLK Day several years back. I had to get her out of the store in a hurry.
Well, the Carthaginians aren’t around to complain about the oppression, so no? But only because of the Carthaginian Genocide – that no one in academia seems to care about.
Here is a delicate subject that is difficult to talk about.
Hey, let’s make it harder!
Nooses, working in fields, and being treated as less-than are not exclusively black things.