When Words Lose Their Power … Because of Alteration

When Words Lose Their Power … Because of Alteration

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Sept. 10/11, 2022

            “What’s in a name? A rose by any name would smell as sweet,” cried Juliet to Romeo. Juliet’s grief was brought on by the fact that her family and Romeo’s family were feuding. She, a Capulet, and Romeo, a Montague, were not allowed to marry because of the feud. Their problem was their names.

            Bill Shakespeare produced this bit of language analysis for us, but American poet Emily Dickinson analyzed words far less dramatically. “Some say a word is dead once it is said,” she wrote. “I say it just begins to live that day.”

            Words can and do live forever, or almost. When my father said to me, “Son, you can’t do anything right,” the words pierced my soul and lived there for eight years. I was fourteen. Although I held the words close, I knew my father didn’t mean what he said. I always did exactly what he asked me to do and in the way he expected. Having bungled a task that caused him much distress, I actually understood his dissatisfaction. Even so, his words lived on.

            Eight years later on the day before my college graduation, I asked my aging father if he still planned to go to the ceremony. My mother had died just four months earlier and my younger brother and I were the only children still at home. Characteristically my father began to rub the back of his neck to ponder my question. Then he said, “Son, I don’t think I can make that long trip after all. You and Carlton go on without me. You know I’m proud of you and you know Mama would be too.” Words can and do cancel other words.

            Words can also flip in meaning. Rhetoric comes to mind. Historically the word has meant “the art of speaking and writing effectively.” Today in most usage the word means hot air as in “The candidate was engaging in rhetoric.” Such pejorative expressions – those that take on negative meaning – are countless. Tyrant once simply meant ruler. Today it means a brutal ruler, thanks to Genghis Khan, Stalin, and others who polluted leadership.  

            Alas, our political lexicon is also undergoing semantic change. The words liberal and conservative are becoming less and less useful to describe our political views. Never-Trumper Republicans and neo-cons are moving so close to liberals they can hardly be called conservatives. Are we, like the Brits with their new “conservative” but former liberal Prime Minister becoming a “uni-party” nation? Not as long as MAGAites and other deplorables stay engaged. Political parties live and die. Heart-felt beliefs live on under one name or another. Does anybody believe the Tea Party is really over? Only its name and leader have changed.

Twenty years ago it would have been accurate to claim that the essence of liberalism is tolerance and that the essence of conservatism is restraint. That was before weasel words took over. Tolerance has been turned on its head. Today’s liberals are the best example of intolerance. Liberals have forsaken their grandparents’ 1960s cry for free speech, now discounting anyone with whom they disagree and canceling history they don’t like. On college campuses liberal students have shouted down conservative speakers for the last eight or nine years, claiming that conservative views make them feel unsafe. Animals have been allowed to run the farm not only in places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Berkley, but at the University of Texas, University of Missouri, and small colleges everywhere.

 What’s happening is the fulfillment of George Orwell’s prophecy. This British writer, once a democratic socialist, warned Britons and Americans that convoluted language would one day be the favorite tool of politicians to sway thought. Think “reproductive freedom” which really means abortion; “disinformation” which means any idea that varies from the accepted leftist position of the day; “equity” which is the weasel word for the totalitarian trinity of socialism, communism, and fascism; and “postmodernism” which argues that all things including gender are a social construct, not a natural order.

Well, at least my father didn’t use weasel words when I disappointed him. It’s a shame that for eight years I held his words against him. It’s also a shame, and dangerous, that too many citizens are not paying attention to the words being tossed around, and altered, by the liberal establishment: by government, media, corporations, education, medicine; you name it.

Language, like politics, is downstream from culture. If words are the vehicles on which our thoughts ride, we best check out the vehicles of every person or institution who wants our vote or our children.

 

Roger Hines

September 8, 2022