Word Salad

Recent shifts in our language have been made with breathtaking speed. The common tongue has become weirdly uncommon .. and divisive. The atmosphere has become dangerous.

English is a “living language.”

“Living” really means that language evolves. Every year dozens of new words and phrases are introduced to Webster’s. A recent example is “new normal,” a phrase that explains the consequential changes in public health and workplace standards caused by the COVID pandemic. 

But the common tongue has become quite uncommon over the past decade. Seismic shifts have been made with breathtaking speed. New glossaries have been born. Others have been rewritten. Even Wikipedia can’t keep up. 

Mostly this transformation arrived in the mainstream from Academia, or has been force-fed through social activism. All too often we speak in terms of theory. Or Constructs. Or jargon. Or relativism. Nothing is certain. No truth is self-evident. 

And a lot of it is just gobbledygook.

Recently, The Daily Show hosted by the now-retired Trevor Noah, poked fun at this modern “word salad,” including several jabs at Vice-President Kamala Harris …

The smarter we try, the dumber we fall. 

And it’s causing national migraines. As Jonathan Haidt described recently in The Atlantic, we have become the “Tower of Babel.”¹

Define: Liberalism.

How have we turned the language upside-down? 

History has a lot to do with it.

Take the contemporary definition of “Liberal.” (Set aside other connotations, like liberal ‘abundant’ seasoning of food.) Liberal(ism) is a politically progressive philosophy mostly associated with the Democratic Party. 

Liberals range on a political gradient that angles Left … Moderate to Social Democrat to Progressive. Some see the extreme endpoint as Socialism.

Liberal philosophy believes that prosperity requires centralized government management of the macroeconomy, the apportioning of a broad social welfare net, and federal regulation of industry and commerce. Morally, Liberals defend against inequality on behalf of minorities or “marginalized” groups. 

Ironically, today’s Liberal is the 180-degree opposite of traditional Liberalism as defined by the Western Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Confused?

Classical Liberalism

Liberalism – post hoc designated Classical Liberalism – was forged on the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment philosophers John Locke, Adam Smith, and Emmanuel Kant. 

Classical Liberalism advocated for the sovereignty of the individual and natural, or fundamental, rights. Enlightenment thinkers wished to steer governance and entitlement away from archaic monarchies, sanctioned by the Church, and towards self-determination and civil liberty.

Smith’s landmark work The Wealth of Nations (1776) described free markets as the hallmark of a prosperous society, and integrated many of Locke’s beliefs.² Locke was the earliest to champion self-autonomy; thus the role of government should be limited to  …

• Preservation of basic freedoms, especially free speech, religion, and assembly 

• Providing only services that could not be provided in a free market (public infrastructure, for example)

• Defending against foreign invasion.

• Maintenance of public institutions, such as government agencies.

In other words, Classical Liberalism pretty much defines modern Conservativism … more specifically Civil Libertarians. 

Interestingly, Classical Liberals rejected the idea of pure democracy—a government shaped solely by a majority vote of citizens—because those majorities might not respect personal property rights or economic freedom. They also feared ‘mob rule,’ where power could be concentrated in the most densely populated states. 

Rather, they favored a constitutional republic, guaranteeing equal states' representative rights and the institution of the Electoral College. 

The forefathers' Liberalism is a far cry from the way it is viewed today. 

Newspeak

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” ³

Today, language is broadly driven by political dogma. It has been weaponized. “Words are violence” became a progressive war cry in the 2010s, equating aggressive tone with physical harm. Ironically, to the most militant partisans, “Silence (inaction) is violence.”

In Orwell's dystopian work 1984, Newspeak was a language favored by the minions of Big Brother and designed to diminish the range of thought. Newspeak was characterized by eliminating words from history or substituting one word for another. 

So the truth becomes an abstraction. Information … misinformation … disinformation is today's Newspeak. Reality is blurred. As a result, the language disconnect has heightened hostility between today's political tribes. Recent polls show that more than 40 percent of Americans believe a second civil war is imminent.⁴ 

Word Salad: A real problem

A problem is defined as a dilemma, or an issue to be resolved. 

Clear. Simple. Straight to the point. Right? 

No, in an effort to make a point more potent, words like problem are spun through a Linguistic Cuisinart. Speak a lot while saying nothing. The end product is aptly named– Word Salad. We used to call it Gobbledygook.  

Take the root word problem. Now add the suffix -atic, and it becomes an adjective: problematic. A step further … add the suffix -matize and it becomes a verb: problematize. 

“Sometimes we problematize modern English. This can be problematic.”

Do people really talk that way? Other than lawyers … or Ivy League professors?

If so, we have a problem.

More Tossed Words

Some words have become so overused that they have lost all meaning. Over the past six months, Fascist has displaced racist and white supremacy for the No. 1 spot on the online hit parade. 

It also is the most sloppily used term in modern history.

Webster’s defines Fascism as …

“a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race or group ethnicity above the individual, and that stands for a government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”

A lot to swallow in this word salad. 

Yet ideologues hurl Fascist! labels at opponents with impunity. It is another version of Newspeak, but better characterized as hyperbole, hysteria and hypocrisy. 

Make no mistake: grasping what fascism meant in its time, from 1920 to 1945, is crucial to understanding our current national political crisis. But we won’t come to an understanding if we keep conflating fascism, the historical phenomenon, with fascism, the political label.

The fascism of the past was a catastrophic totalitarian movement that caused unspeakable human suffering. Fascism today is a political spitball.

Things Fall Apart

Instead of sounding smarter, we scramble the language and dumb down the basic ability to communicate.

Discourse instead of conversation? 

Transparency vs. honesty? 

Existential rather than imminent? 

Quick: Ask 10 people to define Critical Race Theory in 50 words or less. You’ll go 0-for-10. Conservatives howl about CRT indoctrination in schools. Liberals either downplay the idea or deny it even exists.

Writes Dr. Haidt …

“Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”  

All this verbal fuckery⁵ has so alienated Americans that many have vowed never to engage with anyone from the other party. 

Ever. 

Even their own family members. 

Perhaps we’d be better off with “dead languages.”  

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Jim Geschke was inducted into the prestigious Marquis Who’s Who Registry in 2021.

1. “Why The Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, April, 2022 (Link)

2. Locke, considered the Father of Liberalism, wrote that all individuals are equal in the sense that they are born with certain "inalienable" natural rights. That is rights that are God-given and can never be taken or even given away. Among these fundamental natural rights, Locke said, are "life, liberty, and property."

3. The first line of 1984 (George Orwell) written in 1949.

4.  https://www.businessinsider.com/poll-43-percent-americans-expect-civil-war-within-10-years-2022-8

5. I used this word in a previous essay and my brother liked it. So I’m using it again.