Saman.KIn the last few years, I have noticed that some words have changed use cases rapidly. and in this article, I will try to understand what is happening. This will not be an in-depth view but to start a conversation.
Language and its evolution…
Language is a living thing and its evolution is a slow process. Evolution by natural selection is one of the main ways language evolves between generations. When people use a word/phrase it will make it stronger and last longer in the common language. And when a word/phrase is stopped being used by people it dies. Meaning of words is something that comes from people and then it moves upwards towards the dictionaries. Also, the updates of the meaning of each word have a similar process, come from the people and then move upwards to the dictionaries. Dictionaries always lag behind on how people use language. Another way to say it is a slow and bottom-up process.
The health of language…
Healthy evolution of language sways with people and their thoughts rather than language guiding people’s movement towards a certain idea. A healthy language will have a natural implicit democracy. You can think of it as every time a word gets used, the use of the word gets promoted and it will get defined by the context it’s being used in. And this process is usually slow but we can see the shift in the meaning of words by reading old books or using tools like Google Ngrams (https://books.google.com/ngrams)
Orwell depicted the ill language in his book 1984. The purpose of Newspeak was to control people and their thoughts. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” (Orwell 52). The unhealthy language described by Orwell has a top-down process. The top-down process of making and changing existing language needs for an organization (like media channels and governments) to have control over how language is being used. In the book 1984, Winston was working in the Ministry of Truth where his job as an editor was to alter, rewrite and edit a lot of these records to Newspeak and change historical records to fit the needs of the party (now we have fact-checkers to do what ministry of truth did. https://fullfact.org/.). The editing was being done to guide people’s thoughts and behaviour to manufacture consent and show that the party is and was always right.
Coming back to reality…
Controlling language is not just a fictional concept. It usually happens just before wartime in order to distinguish between friendly and enemy troops. It is also used in gangs and mafia for the same purpose.
In the US homeland security website, they have released a “National Terrorism Advisory System”(https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/02/07/dhs-issues-national-terrorism-advisory-system-ntas-bulletin). And they comment “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.” They don’t specify who will judge what is a “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories”. They also have mentioned “The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions; …” witch could include criticizing government information and actions. In this document, they have explicitly left the door open by loose definitions and vague words for them to do anything and call it the fight against “Terrorism”. But we can take a closer look at the words and the definition they used and try to find out what they mean.
Words like “Misinformation” became widely adopted by the media with a different meaning recently. Here is the definition that is being used by CISA a US federal agency “An official website of the United States government” (https://www.cisa.gov/mdm): “Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.”. This definition of “Misinformation” was used to separate factual and false based information but with a strong emphasis on the intention of the person who shares it. This silent judgment of the intention of the person who shares it is where the problems emerge. Who will judge the information and who will judge the intention to cause harm? Can anyone defend themself when they have been labelled as misinformers when the judgment of intention is made by a third party?
There are more words like this that are novel and with an unnatural use and adoption in common language. Examples would be “Disinformation” and “Malinformation”. They are made in an unnatural way to complement “Misinformation”. Moving towards the word “Malinformation” and its definition: “is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”. Once again this definition puts the care/harm principle above truth but disguises it to separate falsities from the truth. To translate the definition: It is fact, but we don’t like you using it in the way you use it. These new words and their carefully constructed definitions give the certain party the upper hand to do whatever they like in theory. As Orwell has described these sorts of language manipulation are dangerous, to say the least. We always had phrases like false/wrong/incorrect/untrue information but they did not account for the intention of the person. US government has manufactured a new definition of these words to judge the perceived intention of people, and use them as tools to identify “National Terrorists”.
There are many examples of manipulated words. The trend I see is words that are built to separate good and evil in a backward or twisted manner. A few examples would be “antiracism”, “antifascism” and “anti-vaxxers” what do they mean?
Have they changed meaning without us noticing it?
At first glance, we see “Anti” next to “racism”, and we think “racism” bad “antiracism” is good! right? In this video (https://odysee.com/@newdiscourses:9/antiracism-a-translation-from-the-wokish:3) James Lindsay has described the meaning of “anti-racism” and what it means for the people who have created it. And here is James Lindsay on “antifascism” (https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-antifascism/).
Moving on to a word that became popular in the past 2 years, “anti-vaxxers”. As far as I have noticed the use cases of “anti-vaxxers” in the media. To become an “anti-vaxxers” you don’t have to be against vaccines, but question a little deep on the policy related to vaccines. The common use cases have a moral judgment attached to them like the good old word “Witch”. “Anti-vaxxers” has its definition changed to describe a person who is against what government says about vaccines. You will be called an “anti-vaxxer” even if you are a vaccine scientist and had all of your vaccines, but you disagree with how the vaccine is being implemented and the rules surrounding that conversation.
It seems like all of these words and updated meanings have hidden judgment backing them. Could they be new tools to demoralize and dehumanize that we are not aware of?
Closing thoughts…
Of course, some people will not agree with the way I have described some words and the judgment I have put on them. I might have not given enough resources for your taste, after all, this is just to start the conversation but, absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.
My method to find the real definitions of words is to find out the outcome of their use in extreme cases and work backward to describe where boundaries lay. I believe the extreme use cases of a word is important to discover where the boundaries of words are and what they can be used for.
A language is a tool, just like an axe. We have to take care of it so we can use it when we need it the most.
Join us to continue the discussion (https://www.meetup.com/The_Examined_Life/events/281956811/).
Some useful links…
A different perspective on fact-checkers by Heather Heying (https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/coming-soon?s=r)
A different perspective on “mis- dis- and mal-information” by hosts of the darkhorse podcast (https://odysee.com/@DarkHorsePodcastClips:b/anyone,-at-anytime,-can-spread-mal:1).
During the research of this article I have found James Lindsay’s works and his work “Translations from the Wokish” (https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/), it might help you through your research.
On dehumanization (https://samank.substack.com/p/dehumanize?s=w)
