A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
A WORD (OR A FEW) TO THE WISE
Words are weaponized in countless ways. “Feminist” is hurled as an insult. Teachers and librarians are alarmed to find themselves redefined as “groomers,” not to be trusted with children. Image credit: KETUT SUBIYANTO on Pexels.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
In her introduction to At A Loss For Words, Carol Off writes about how British author Robert Macfarlane taught her that words are key to our ability to imagine our world.
He discovered that the Oxford Junior Dictionary had dropped words from nature – like dandelion, willow and otter – and replaced them with words from the tech world such as blog and attachment.
Macfarlane worried that if children no longer knew the exact word for these animals and plants, then the species themselves wouldn’t find a place in their imaginations.
In his book Is A River Alive? Macfarlane describes shifting baseline syndrome or generational amnesia. “While someone born in the 70s might recall car windscreens spattered by countless insect impacts after a long journey, windscreens today bear a fraction of those marks. But someone born in the early 2000s would not recognize this as signifying a drastic decline in flying insect populations because they never knew the earlier abundance.”
The same syndrome has masked the stages of rivers’ ruin, he wrote. And, as Off says, it applies to the erosion of the meaning of words, specially to our political vocabulary – but with a twist. We keep the word, but the idea it represents is lost.
She lists the countless ways in which words are weaponized.
One side insists liberals are really communists and the other argues that all conservatives are fascists.
Teachers and librarians are alarmed to find themselves redefined as “groomers,” not to be trusted with children.
“Feminist” is hurled as an insult.
Of the far too many words being misused to divert attention from the truth, to hurt, Off picks six.
Freedom.
Democracy.
Truth.
Woke.
Choice.
And I wasn’t expecting this one, but, Taxes.
Off shares chilling examples of the power of words, and how they are twisted to serve an agenda.
Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer told the Nuremberg Tribunal that “what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought... People are persuaded to believe that a strongman is the solution, that no one needs to think for themselves.”
In the chapter on Freedom, she writes that it has become the buzzword for those who believe they have been left behind by a society that is changing beyond their recognition. “The word is redolent of the struggle of people who died or went to prison to achieve it, but in recent years, it’s been hijacked by those who see liberation from their responsibility to others.”
Those who didn’t want to be vaccinated during the COVID pandemic began demanding freedom from the vaccine mandate with calls to kill healthcare workers.
The examples from history are eye-openers. Socrates and Plato didn’t “entirely trust democracy” in Greece, the bastion of political freedom. In a direct democracy, Plato believed, “Fathers lose control over their strong-headed sons, slaves question their servitude, and women start to regard themselves as equal to men.”
As are those from our current times: The fastest growing source of fake news in the world isn’t part of a nefarious conspiracy network (though it feeds the conspiracies), but the work of tech-savvy kids who just want to make money.
As the 18-year-old Macedonian youth tells an NBC correspondent, his fake news posts do better than those of mainstream media because they are not allowed to lie.
We recall what unfolded in Washington on January 6, 2021. But perhaps not what unfolded on June 1, 2020, also in Washington during the nation-wide protests against George Floyd’s murder..
Off quotes Rahul Dubey, a city resident with no involvement in the demonstration, on how he witnessed the authorities intentionally corner the peaceful protesters “to make it a ticking time bomb”.
She concludes the chapter with this: There’s a reason why the idea of freedom failed in ancient Greece and Rome – it was not inclusive. The only way we can thwart the ambitions of the chaos agents is to reinvent the language of rights and freedoms in ways that include more people. That means bringing everyone – left and right – into the tent...”
In the chapter on Truth, she writes that to work as a journalist these days is to report in a political landscape where up is down, in is out, and two plus two equals five.
She includes truthiness, coined by Stephen Colbert – back in 2005. “Now defined as the quality of being considered to be true because of what the believer wishes or feels, regardless of the facts.”
And I am reminded of my father saying some people’s mantra was “I have made up my mind, don’t confuse me with facts”.
But that was before we had “alternative facts” made famous by senior White House advisor, Kellyanne Conway!
At A Loss For Words by Carol Off is published by Vintage, $24.
After the Conway interview, Penguin US ordered a print run of 75,000 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four as sales, the company said, hit hyperactive, writes Off. Orwellian and doublethink were back in our lexicon. And the infamous declaration of Big Brother, that “two plus two equals five” was a metaphor of the moment.
There was also the power lie, a different kind of deception, as she writes.
And on Woke: Meant to define social awareness, it has been “so perverted that those in the Black Lives Matter movement, from which the modern version of the term emerged, have abandoned it. ‘Anti woke’ is a euphemism that disguises xenophobia, racism and misogyny.”
Award-winning journalist and author Carol Off has interviewed and conducted 25,000 interviews as CBC Radio’s co-host of As It Happens. She has spoken to everyone from Masha Gesson and Maria Ressa to Michael Ignatieff, to name just a few, and brings their perspectives to her book on how in these polarizing years, words that used to define civil society and social justice are being put to work for a completely different political agenda, bleached of their meaning as the values they represent are mocked and distorted.
There’s so much unpack in this book, so much to learn.
Read, absorb, and weigh your words from hereon.