I hope it is well known the political arena is where good taste, sense, and language all journey to die. A tired death like Luke Skywalker’s, where he just dissipates as a fart in an elevator after six bad hours of Star Wars.
Politicos have been abusing and misusing language for millennia by now. Weaponizing language is their thing. Their struggle, their jam, their kampf. It's an art and they're the washed-up house painters and Senators with a will to sound ridiculous.
Language is like a drug. More a grab-bag of drugs. The more you gobble Percocet the less Percocet works. When it quits affecting you, you give it a break and reach for Xanax. After riding those teacups long enough you start a Substack. And so on.
As with designer drugs so with language.
This is why academics squeeze out new terms year after year to describe something already possessing a descriptor. Keeps it fresh! Publish or perish is a harsh mistress when your only product is ideas and you ain’t got none.
There is still a market to capture. Dreaming up new terms for old things gets the youth engaged and keeps academics ensconced in their sconces. I call tenured academic positions sconces.
I do this for a few reasons.
It reduces an eight-syllable term to two.
With context present no meaning is lost.
I think it's funny.
My only product is ideas.
These newer terms are sometimes better than the previous and oftentimes worse. But for better or worse is famously unreliable in the modern day. Consider my list above provisional criteria for better, with worse as their opposite.
Take the term hobo. The nomadic hobo is now referred to as person experiencing homelessness. This more than implies it's just something that happens. Like some degenerate slipped some unsheltered into their drink at the club and here we are on a four-engine bullet out of Tulsa.
With context, not all homeless are hobos. That's fair. But the people who say person experiencing homelessness don't know the bloody difference. They transmogrify two syllables into a torturous ten and call you a fascist if you don’t. Homeless crisis solved.
Consider the term crazy. This word is politically incorrect. Neurodivergent is how the kids refer to their nuts these days. They’ll tell you it doesn’t mean that. They won’t actually be lying, either. But I often ponder whether a lie requires intent.
From what do your neuroses diverge? The majority? The largest body of nutbags in history? Those who are supposedly neuro-normative in relation to neurodivergent? The sane highway to your loopy off-ramp? Simple Jack is neurodivergent. You’re just white. Two syllables morphologize into five.
Consider the term native. This word was considered racist or too nativist. The proper manner of referring to the still-noble-savage is indigenous peoples now. The meaning hasn’t changed, nor has the manner of indulging or deriding someone based on race.
I don’t feel like giving this one a fair hearing, just as I don’t feel like instituting an Irish History Month. Categorizing any individual via some collectivist fever dream fantasy like race is racist. Call it what you like. But make it funny, at least. Two syllables turned a silly six.
Applied to a few terms we begin to see how academic language makes some working people want to puke. Working people defined as individuals who produce ideas in addition to products and services. Uber drivers have some wild ideas, too.
I met this one guy. Absolute lunatic. He figured Satanists were behind all the Christian nationalist nonsense enjoying the illusion of a renaissance lately. This intrigued me as I am neurodivergent and can't be held responsible for not thinking good.
When I asked him how propping up the Abrahamic God - the Lightbringer’s adversary traditionally - served Satan at all, he said they called The Devil ‘God’ with no one the wiser. They were optimists promising eternal hell.
I gave him five upside-down stars. I wish I could give more, but his God will compensate him upon death. Should be a long time from now. He wore a surgical mask, so he obviously cared about safety and/or not being identified.
I would too if I drove with a baby on my lap.
All of this whining about the English language descending into euphemistic circle-jerks has a point. Changing the term for something isn’t progress. Nothing is solved. The problem remains, whether it's a lack of housing, mental illness, or racism. We're just playing with symbols, making them more annoying.
Unless you're trying to trick people and pull the old switcheroo on deities, of course.
I like solving problems. Sometimes, I don’t even tell people I solved one. When I see people in politics arguing over what to call a problem, rather than discussing the problem, my bullshit detector flares up again like an election year or sticky italics.
We're about to have another year of would-be king circus seals arfing at each other for making the wrong sounds with their mouths. It will seem like they're looking to discuss problems, but they'll be whining about what we call it, instead. They'll discuss each other.
Underlying it will be the old problems unaddressed.
Does Hamas deserve eradication? Yup. Has the Israeli state gone too far rooting out Hamas with an unacceptable level of collateral? They sure have. Will arguing about what to call it affect either at all? Nope.
Call it genocide if you want. Maybe a military police action. Or a targeted strike. Please do. I like to know who is euphemizing early in a conversation so I can quit listening. But the old term is shorter, retains meaning, and puts it in bad enough company already.
War.
We bankroll them all over the world. There is never any real doubt whether we will stop doing this. Congresslizards call the recipients of our money war criminals just prior to voting to pay them for their service anyway. This is not problem solving. This is the problem. The adorable arfing is a distraction.
The spice must flow according to these people. I refer to American dollars as spice. Five syllables apotheosize into one universal skeleton key.
When Frank Herbert wrote Dune, no doubt he meant the melange moving the world was oil. But we found a way around that with typical American ingenuity. Buy our way in, stick like a tick, say we shouldn’t, then scroll social media to make sure we still have principles.
Oh, thank Satan. Never mind the need for aid in Gaza is due to American bombs and money propping up a war effort. A siege they call a blockade. This is the foreign policy equivalent of having your bomb and eating it too.
I'm not even sure what they mean by aid anymore. Particularly with airdrop included.
If we turned off the firehose today, no doubt the wars would continue tomorrow. But I get a bit moralist about killing babies, separating them from parents, and/or putting them in cages. I'm real squishy about bankrolling that sort of thing.
Speaking of, where we at with that? Do we still lock up immigrant kids in the USA? Do you know? We stopped talking about it, so the problem must have been solved. Right? The answer is unclear. People just argue over whether soft walled enclosures with armed guards are cages.
But I bet those kids know the answer. I bet the Gazans do, too. And it is one syllable.
Sic vivitur.
I loved this stack and I didn't have to dig up my Cliff notes on Greek mythology once!
Keep em coming. You're an inspiration
Neo