Loosening our bounds to reality is attractive also because calling things by whatever names serves our immediate purpose liberates us from the hard work of understanding things not of our making, and gives us the illusion of mastery over our environment. It is especially attractive to those who have power over others, because it frees them from having to persuade the rest of humanity. For society’s mob of lazy under-performers, pleasing the leaders is an easier way of securing one’s place than competing for merit. Anyhow: intellectual/moral deterioration has ever been an easier sell than the hard acquisition of skills and virtues.
Michael Walsh
September 22, 2021
The Prince: Angelo Codevilla, 1943-2021
[The redefining, or perhaps it’s better called undefining, of words is a source of great irritation to me. Words mean things. And when people start ignoring the true meanings of words we no longer have a basis of communication. Such people might as well use a few grunts and snorts rather than multisyllable words.—Joe]
When we started having kids we joked about teaching them all the wrong names for things for 6 years then sending them to school.
Turns out it’s official policy to do that in high school and college now.
Redefining words has nothing to do with “touchy feely” psycho BS.
It’s about POWER. When you control the language you control the
society that speaks that language. And CONTROL is the ONLY thing
the leftists currently in power care about.
I have never found it since, but forty five years ago I saw a quote from someone who presented a Spanish Language Grammar book to the King of Spain in the age of the Conquistadors. The King asked of what use the book was, and the author said, “Excellency, language is the perfect tool of empire.”
He who names things, owns them. So, yeah, its about power.
And it’s about destroying the ability of people to think. Humans manipulate symbols of the real world (words) to figure out the real world. If the meaning of those words is foggy, your thinking will be even more foggy. If you lack a word for something, you have to invent one before you can think about it – and you can’t communicate your results to others until you’ve agreed on the word.
Adults who grew up with precise words and know how to think can resist this. But when the schools start messing with the words they teach the children…