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In my recent post on Covid (12/3/24), I remarked that a calling card of the Left has always been the redefinition of terminology, so that words are transformed into a fundamentally altered, or even opposite, meaning. Revisiting this phenomenon, I was reminded of a story.
One day during the late 1980s, I was sitting in a café in Philadelphia, discussing current affairs with a wise old gentleman who had vast experience in the world of think tanks and public policy. We were lamenting the adoption by the city of some harebrained program championed by the usual nutjob Leftist coalition. We concluded that it was well-nigh impossible to challenge the move in a public forum because all of the keywords associated with the program were ingrained in the hivemind as positive: war on poverty, anti-discrimination, equal rights, empowerment, etc. My interlocutor, with a deep sigh, then proclaimed: “The Left owns the rhetoric.” Never were truer words spoken. We face the same problem today. The components of Leftist ideology are so infused in our language that we hardly notice it, to the degree that we often are unable to formulate an adequate response in our own minds. We become paralyzed, without knowing why. Consider, for example, the controversy surrounding the bathrooms at the Capitol in Washington, DC. A few members of Congress are bravely resisting the Alphabet freak show, and I applaud their efforts. But they are hamstrung by the lexicon itself because they engage in arguments about gender. Until recently, this word was almost exclusively a linguistic term, denoting an attribute of a noun: masculine, feminine, or neuter. When the subject was people (or animals), the operative word was sex. As in male or female. If you argue over “gender,” you have already conceded half the battle. Once this linguistic battle is lost, the door is open to a torrent of twisted Orwellian doublespeak. A good example is the mind-bending term gender-affirming care to describe the genital mutilation of children. A related sleight-of-hand is the use of the third-person plural, they, in place of the grammatically correct singular form, he or she. In addition to being a linguistic atrocity, this usage serves to blur the identification of people as male or female. The language now forces us all to speak of each other as androgynous beings. Chalk up another victory for the Left. Higher culture requires the ability to identify and analyze differences, great and subtle, between people, things, and concepts. This intellectual process used to be called discrimination. We all know what happened to the word. For decades already, noticing differences between people, once obligatory in educated circles, is taboo. A final example, and this one a bit more subtle: The use of the word planet instead of world. I am hearing this more and more. “Everyone on the planet knows that…” “They have the best sausage on the planet” “No one on the planet believes that…” etc. In all cases, up until very recently, the usage would have been “in the world” instead of “on the planet.” Planet denotes a hunk of rock, an inanimate object. It is a favorite word of the Climate-Industrial Complex. In contrast, world denotes people, nations, cultures, etc. A huge difference. When we use planet, we are already sucked halfway into the Green scam, without a single argument being made.
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One of the signs of a civilization gone AWOL (absent without leave) is the abuse of language. The meaning of numerous words and concepts has been inverted, a phenomenon duly noted by George Orwell, and discussed at length by subsequent commentators.
A parallel development is that many words and phrases have been misused and misapplied, often as the result of rampant laziness and ignorance. These misapplications are then propagated with lightning speed throughout the society, to include purportedly educated classes of people. A particularly annoying example is the use of the term "literally." How many times must we cringe from such statements as "the politician's insulting remarks were literally a bomb tossed at the opposition." Or how about "I was literally freaking out when I heard that nonsense." We cannot have intelligent discourse when people are literally shredding the language. Whenever I hear people literally using the word literally, my head literally explodes. |
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