Another
of my favorite rant subjects....the trashing of our language in
the service of politics. The late semanticist Dr. (&
Senator) S. I. Hayakawa was always one of my heroes. He was
the Senator who famously said, in regard to the Panama Canal, "We
stole it fair & square, and we should keep it." He also
remarked that
“Bilingualism for the
individual is fine, but not for a country.” This from the son
of immigrants who himself became a naturalized citizen.
Anyway, here is the subject
well addressed by Thomas Sowell in his syndicated column:
The
Left Has Its Own Vocabulary by Dr.
Thomas Sowell
A recent
angry e‑mail from a reader said that certain issues should not be
determined by "the dictates of the market." With a mere turn of a
phrase, he had turned reality upside down.
Decisions by people free to make their mutual
accommodations with other free people were called "dictates" while
having third parties tell all of them what they could and couldn't
do was not.
Verbal coups have long been a specialty of the left.
Totalitarian countries on the left have called themselves "people's
democracies" and used the egalitarian greeting "comrade" -‑ even
though some comrades had the arbitrary power of life and death over
other comrades.
In democratic countries, where public opinion
matters, the left has used its verbal talents to change the whole
meaning of words and to substitute new words, so that issues would
be debated in terms of their redefined vocabulary, instead of the
real substance of the issues.
Words which have acquired connotations from the
actual experiences of millions of human beings over generations, or
even centuries, have been replaced by new words that wipe out those
connotations and substitute more fashionable notions of the left.
The word "swamp," for example, has been all
but erased from the language. Swamps were messy, sometimes smelly,
places where mosquitoes bred and sometimes snakes lurked. The
left has replaced the word "swamp" with "wetlands," a word spoken in
pious tones usually reserved for sacred things.
The point of this verbal sleight‑of‑hand is to
impose the lefts notions of how other people can use their own land.
Restrictive laws about "wetlands" have imposed huge costs on farmers
and other owners of land that happened to have a certain amount of
water on it.
Another word that the left has virtually banished
from the language is “bum”. Centuries of experience with
idlers who refused to work and who hung around on the streets making
a nuisance of themselves were erased from our memories as the left
verbally transformed those same people into a sacred icon, "the
homeless.”
As with swamps, what was once messy and smelly was
now turned into something we had a duty to protect. It was now our
duty to support people who refused to support themselves
Crimes committed by bums are covered up by the media,
by verbally transforming "the homeless" into "transients" or
"drifters" whenever they commit crimes. Thus “the homeless" are the
only group you never hear of committing any crimes.
More to the point, third parties' notions are
imposed by the power of the government to raise our taxes to support
people who are raising hell on our streets and in parks where it has
often become too dangerous for our children to play.
The left has a whole vocabulary devoted to depicting
people who do not meet standards as people who have been denied
"access."
Whether it is academic standards, job qualifications
or credit requirements, those who do not measure up are said to have
been deprived of "opportunity," "rights" or "social justice."
The words games of the left are not just games. They
are ways of imposing power by evading issues of substance through
the use of seductive rhetoric.
"Rights," for example, have become an all‑purpose
term used for evading both facts and logic by saying that people
have a "right" to whatever the left wants to give them by taking
from others.
For centuries, rights were exemptions from
government power, as in the Bill of Rights. Now the left has
redefined rights to things that can be demanded from the taxpayers,
or from private employers or others, on behalf of people who accept
no mutual obligations, even for common decency.
‑Dr. Thomas Sowell is an economist and a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif.-
JW's Added ranting:
A major peeve of mine not mentioned by Dr. Sowell is the full-scale
hijacking and re-definition of the suffix "-phobic", a term used in
the mental health world to indicate an "exaggerated, inexplicable
and illogical fear" of something. The left first popularized
the use of the term "homophobic" to describe anyone who was not 100%
in favor of all things homosexual. Now the same technique is
again being used throughout the media world with regard to Islam;
anyone who has any distaste whatsoever for the excesses of Islam is
described as being an "Islamophobic",
the objective of this distortion of language being, of course, to
imply that all such people are mentally unbalanced, i.e., crazy.
Dr. Sowell was
too nice to get into it, but the politically correct crowd has also
gone wild with non-political euphemisms. Take for example “mentally
retarded”. From the relatively mild “disadvantaged” to the
totally ridiculous “alternately gifted”, it’s almost a subculture in
itself.
"Alternately gifted", although ridiculous and highly annoying, is at
least fairly innocuous compared to the examples given above.
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