Just a few weeks ago, I received a beautiful bouquet of flowers from my daughters for Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, Congresswoman Cori Bush has just declared the word “mother” isn’t inclusive enough, so instead we will now be called “birthing persons.” Good thing the Radical Left doesn’t want to demean women or who knows what they’d be calling us. Having been a mother for more than 30 years, I can tell you there’s more to it than the birthing part. So I hereby submit my humble petition to keep the word “mother” in our vocabulary.
The English language is one of the richest in history. Our vocabulary includes over a million distinct words. There are more than 600,000 words in the OED, and nearly 200,000 in common use today. Compare that to Russian with about 150,000 and Chinese with around 85,000.
Sure, there are other cultures with certain vocabulary bragging rights or linguistic flair. The classic example is the Eskimos, who have – by some accounts – 50 words for snow. The Germans do great mash-ups of words, such as this beauty: kummerspeck, which translates literally as “grief bacon” and means emotional overeating.
Unlike some purists, I don’t object to adding new words to the English language from time to time. A few years ago, my daughters and I needed a word to describe something that is so poisonous to your humanity it is actually soul-destroying. We came up with “animaclastic.” A handy word when reading the headlines these days. My girls have recently shared with me their newest word: anecdata. It means “statistics” supported by anecdotes, rather than research or science. I think it was inspired by Dr. Faucci.
But as the little elephant in Tarzan said, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. It’s one thing to invent a word when you need to describe something new (like “listicle,” which by the way is one of my favorite PR tools) or when a proper noun becomes so ubiquitous it earns its place as a real word (“let me google that”).
But when words are stripped of their meaning, or used to mean the opposite of what they have historically meant, we are entering dangerous territory.
And it is very clear we have not just entered dangerous territory, we are careening down the slippery slope of meaning towards an abyss of nonsense.
Let’s start with a very simple word: “is.” Remember our old friend Bill Clinton? When asked about his relationship with a White House Intern, he famously said “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” And so began the second age of the Pharisees. A word can mean whatever you want it to mean, to suit your legal argument in court. Or in the court of public opinion.
Politicans are expert at this. Consider the names of these highly-touted bills passed by Congress:
The American Rescue Plan. This $1.9 trillion boondoggle was filled with progressive pet projects, while paying people to stay home and play video games instead of going back to work, all of which did virtually nothing to “rescue” the economy or the country.
The Affordable Care Act. AKA, Obamacare. Who could be opposed to making care affordable? Of course, the reality was this law has made insurance massively more expensive for middle-income families and small business owners, and made care much harder to get.
Meanwhile, we are paralyzed over pronouns. “They” apparently no longer means “those people,” it means one person of indiscriminate gender. Not sure what two people of unknown gender are supposed to be called. I have no malice against a person who is unclear about their gender. But don’t tell me I have to use a plural pronoun for a singular person. We have gone from clarity to ridiculous confusion.
In addition to canceling the word “mother,” we also are no longer permitted to use any words with “man” in them, so there is no such thing as a chairman, a mailman, a serviceman or a human (not kidding). Apparently the “gender neutral” form of the word “human” is “humxn.” What propagandist promoted the idea that the word “human” is masculine? By definition it means a person, a homo sapien.
You’ll probably get kicked off the plane if you call for the “stewardess.” Personally, I thought it was handy to distinguish between a steward and a stewardess (let’s see, which person was it who promised to bring me that ginger ale?). I remember (sort of) when stewardship was a noble concept. Somehow it’s now considered demeaning. Think about that for a moment and perhaps you’ll realize how we got to a place where college students need play-dough and safe spaces to prepare them for the real world.
Beneath all the nonsense lurks a sinister agenda. This assault on basic word usage is not about protecting people’s feelings, and it certainly isn’t about better communication or clearer meaning. It is about politics. It is about a radical, angry, intolerant minority forcing an agenda down our throats — and then insisting that we embrace their world view or remain silent.
Ironically, we are often silenced with another favorite tactic of the language storm-troopers: we are called racists. Never mind the inconvenient truth that actual racism is happening at colleges, businesses, and organizations all across the country – only it’s being done by the very shamers who call conservatives “racists.” When people — yes, even white people — are denied jobs because they are of a certain race, that’s racism. When people — again, even white people — are told they are not allowed into a classroom or movie theatre or meeting because they are of a certain race, that’s racism. When an individual is told he must apologize for his entire race to another entire race for something that individual never did – that’s racism. It’s also the surest route to civil breakdown.
Maybe it’s no big deal if LOL becomes a word; maybe it’s fine if we use presently to mean currently rather than soon. But when words are hijacked for a political agenda, language becomes weaponized. And language is a powerful weapon in the hands of tyrants.