Comments on: Semantic sabotage, or Words that Need a Holiday

By: Chaos Tamer

Chaos Tamer — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:09:48 +0000

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.

By: gaetano catelli

gaetano catelli — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:22:38 +0000

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.

By: Lefroy

Lefroy — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:11:17 +0000

“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.

By: Arthur Glass

Arthur Glass — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:34:12 +0000

‘…a pardigmatic Latin verb of the first declension.

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

By: Arthur Glass

Arthur Glass — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:22:49 +0000

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.

By: Steynian 303

Steynian 303 — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 08:14:56 +0000

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

By: Susan

Susan — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 03:37:29 +0000

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?

By: Nuff Said

Nuff Said — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:22:58 +0000

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”!

By: Steynian 303 « Free Canuckistan!

Steynian 303 « Free Canuckistan! — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:37:20 +0000

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

By: Lefroy

Lefroy — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:59:05 +0000

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”.