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December 31st, 2008 9:40 am

Semantic sabotage, or Words that Need a Holiday

I have been thinking of compiling a list of words that I used to like but that have been made suspect or unusable because of the semantic sabotage that has been practiced upon them. It would, I fear, take quite a while to complete, but that is no reason I shouldn’t offer a quick first installment featuring two words that have been much in the news: “stimulus” and “proportion.”

It wasn’t that many weeks ago that you could still use “stimulus” without communicating a sense of fiscal irresponsibility and fondness for socialism. Today, alas, whenever I hear the word “stimulus,” especially in conjunction with the word “package,” I know that the speaker is using the agreed upon code words for “plundering taxpayers, present and future, in order to shore up wasteful government programs and failing industries.” The reality of the process–the fact that government reaction to finding itself in an economic hole is to order everyone to dig deeper–is plenty depressing all by itself. But it adds insult to injury that a perfectly good word has been rendered hors de combat by being enlisted in this latest effort to enlarge the role of the government in your life.

Then there’s the word “proportion” and its cognates (”proportionate,” “disproportionate,” etc). You might think that the situation in the Middle East is conspicuously unsuited to produce comic thoughts, but I confess that I find it grotesquely comic that entities like Hamas are given a free pass to bombard Israel with rockets while Israel is instantly condemned when it defends itself. Why is that? Ed Husain, Britain’s latest candidate for the title of “moderate Muslim” (see what I mean about the list being a long one?), took to the pages of The Guardian to express his outrage over “Israel’s massacre of innocent Palestinians in Gaza.” Andrew McCarthy drew my attention to Melanie Phillips’s tart rejoinder:

The vast majority of Gazans who have been killed were Hamas terrorists. According to today’s UN figures, 364 have been killed of whom only 62 were civilians. Israel has been targeting only the Hamas infrastructure and its terror-masters, as detailed here. While some civilian casualties are unfortunately inevitable, Israel is clearly attempting to minimise them. It is Hamas which deliberately targets Israeli civilians when it fires its rockets and detonates its human bombs specifically at Israeli civilian targets. It is Hamas which deliberately turns its own civilians into targets by siting its rockets and other military equipment under apartment blocks and in centres of densely crowded population. Hamas tries to kill as many Israeli innocents as possible; Israel’s military operation is conducted solely to defend its people against such attack and is designed to minimise the loss of civilian life in Gaza. To draw an equivalence between the two is obscene.

Quite. But that obscenity is the media’s staple crop when it comes to Israel. It’s a specimen instance of what Andrew McCarthy has called “disproportionate idiocy.” Israel is surrounded by fanatical regimes whose rulers deny its legitimacy and its right to exist. For the last 60 years, the Arab world has lost no opportunity to strike out at Israel. No week is complete for the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without a histrionic threat to destroy Israel. What would you do if a neighboring country kept lobbing high explosive into your neighborhood while another country a bit further away punctuated its all-out effort to acquire nuclear arms with periodic threats to exterminate you? If you wrote for The New York Times you would recommend that Israel “Fight Fire With a Cease-Fire,” refraining “unilaterally and absolutely” from fighting back even if Hamas continues its aggression. Most of us, though, would react exactly as has Israel: by fighting for survival. I think of a saying that was often of the lips of my late colleague Samuel Lipman: “It’s such strange animal: When attacked, it defends itself.”

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15 Comments

1. Lefroy:

Another word deserving of a rest:

“Restraint”.

This does not in fact mean “restraint”. It means doing nothing at all (while fundamentalists whose idea of education is teaching boys to recite the Koran and blowing up girls’ schools, lob rockets at Israeli civilians. OK, so Hamas isn’t as quite bad as the Taliban, but they’re not much better, and equally brutal).

Dec 31, 2008 - 4:39 pm 2. John N. Frary:

OTHER NOMINEES:

“sensitivity”—ugh, nasty

“process”—as in “peace process” among many others

“sustainability” and all its variants.

“diversity”—ENOUGH!

“racist”—useful only for those willing to call themselves racists.

Jan 1, 2009 - 2:54 am 3. Mary Jackson:

Also tainted is the word “plight”. It is used a great deal to refer to the largely self-inflicted problems of the Palestinians. (See here.

Jan 1, 2009 - 7:15 am 4. Arthur Glass:

My hackles are raised by the the ubiquity of the word ‘issues’. So-and-so is not livid with rage, he has ‘anger management issues’. Route 287 in northern New Jersey is often subject to ‘black ice issues’. The New York Mets still have ’second base issues,’ although their bullpen issues seem to have been de-issued.

No one has problems or difficulties any more, just bloodless, nerveless ‘issues’.

Jan 1, 2009 - 7:35 am 5. Arthur Glass:

Sed contra, as Thomas of Aquino would say, I look forward to reading the January issue of The New Criterion.

Jan 1, 2009 - 8:19 am 6. Lefroy:

Useful but misused words sometimes become unsalvageable. Two examples.

“Liberal”. American usage has wrecked this word. Once bewitching, redolent of fine and noble ideas, it is now narrow and ugly, meaning simply “left wing”. It only retains its vitality in stock phrases, when coupled with a handful of abstractions (liberal democracy, liberal arts), but is dead on its own.

Secondly – “gender”. Ugh! The dreadful usage of the word to mean “sex” is just euphemism. Embarrassed and humorless academics invented this one, proving (if proof were needed) that fussy puritanism survives today in the collective psyche of the left, especially the academic left.

At least this word can be dusted off and used unambiguously as a grammatical term. Not so “liberal”.

Jan 1, 2009 - 2:59 pm 7. Steynian 303 « Free Canuckistan!:

[...] SEMATIC sabotage, or Words that Need a Holiday, by Roger Kimball …. [...]

Jan 2, 2009 - 3:37 pm 8. Nuff Said:

Arthur Glass has a problem with “issues”; Lefroy has a problem with “gender”. While in total agreement with both comments (and commentators for that matter) I have an additional problem (issue?!) with “gender issues”!

Jan 2, 2009 - 4:22 pm 9. Susan:

As a child I had a gay time playing with fairies in the woods. I also pretended to be a queen. Can kids do that any more?

Jan 2, 2009 - 8:37 pm 10. Steynian 303:

[...] SEMATIC sabotage, or Words that Need a Holiday, by Roger Kimball …. [...]

Jan 3, 2009 - 1:14 am 11. Arthur Glass:

Let me blow off some spleen, while we’re at, over the misuse of the word ‘paradigm’ as always synonomous with ‘model’. A paradigm is a model of a certain sort; it is a particular example of a general pattern, one that exhibits clearly, simply and perfectly the structure characteristic of that pattern. For example, ‘amo, amas, amat…etc.’is a pardigmatic Latin verb
of the first declension. Achilles is the paradigm of an epic warrior. Sandy Koufax is the paradigm of a left-handed power pitcher.

What a paradigm is not is a completely abstract model. The standard cosmology of astrophysics, centered on the ‘Big Bang’ hypothesis, is not a paradigm.

All of this is pace Thomas Kuhn, whose __Structure of Scientific Revolutions__ did much to popularize this abuse.

Jan 3, 2009 - 7:22 am 12. Arthur Glass:

‘…a pardigmatic Latin verb of the first declension.

That should be ‘first conjugation’, of course. Substantives, i.e. nouns and adjectives, have declensions.

Jan 3, 2009 - 9:34 am 13. Lefroy:

“Executive” to mean, absurdly, “the boss”.

Lifestyle pages of our best newspapers are responsible for this one. In the review of the latest trendy restaurant you will be introduced breathlessly to the “executve chef”. He/she is not “the chef who toils in the kitchen and carries out the orders of the head chef”. It means “the head chef”. Comical.

Jan 3, 2009 - 4:11 pm 14. gaetano catelli:

thank you, Lefroy, for setting the record straight on the kidnapping of “liberal” by the illiberal left.

“choice” has come to mean only the choice of abortion or gay sex. it never means (anymore) the enlargement of individual choice in the marketplace as against government programs.

whatever happened to the Keynesian notion that $1 trillion in withholding tax cuts would provide economic “stimulus” whose effects would be nigh instantaneous and (unlike bridges to nowhere, for example) unopposed by environmental groups or neighborhood associations?

oh, and “investment” has come to mean ANY new government spending program — even if all or most of the money will be consumed in the current period.

Jan 4, 2009 - 3:22 pm 15. Chaos Tamer:

Several more:
Multicultural- a word that has either lost meaning, or now means
“give up your culture in favor of mine or be labeled a bigot”;
Ecumenical – similar loss of meaning, now used as
“agree with my philosophy/doctrine, or be labeled a bigot”;
Progressive – has lost meaning along with its fellow
traveler, “liberal”, et.al.;
Traditional – now seems to be used by “progressives” to mean
Neanderthal, fascist, et.al.

Jan 5, 2009 - 11:09 am