Posted on 05/01/2018 2:20:48 PM PDT by markomalley
Whether we are communicating something simple like a restaurant order or something complex like a tax code, we expect others to understand. Language provides an avenue to express shared meaning so humans can relate to one another. On college campuses, social media, and in the courts, this shared meaning is being destroyed. Through linguistic activism, leftists have begun a full-scale war on language, playing by their own set of constantly shifting rules.
I don’t know when it started or with what word, but the modern American lexicon is changing faster than society can keep up. Any twentieth-century liberal who walked onto a college campus today would be more confused than the town drunk from Babel straggling into town the morning after a bender. Words can now literally be defined with their antonym. We are a hair’s width and an ounce of stupidity away from “war is peace, freedom is slavery.”
Word games take many forms, and honest people must call it out. At Prager University, Michael Knowles exposes this tactic and how it affects the culture. Underlying each tactic is misuse of words.
This isn’t innocent linguistic drift or slang; it is a conscious effort to reshape society. The schemes include redefining words for personal gain, using modifiers to alter the meaning of a word, replacing technical words with colloquial ones, and creating new words. Each of these is a bullying tactic, which distort effective discourse.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
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They play with the word “hate”, too. But I “HATE” modern leftist “liberals” in the traditional sense of the word “hate”, because they are Marxists masquerading as social critics and engineers with good intentions, whereas, they are actually “EVIL” to the core. . . in the traditional sense of “Evil”.
I remember when the then “Negro Community” asked that everyone change their language to “Black”.
Fair enough. I’ll call you what you want.
Now, they want “African American?” I don’t think so. You got your one shot at me for a lifetime. If ya messed up that one, I’ve go nothing else for you.
False equivilency. Hillary was just rattling off all the trickery of the meany media, in a recent speech.
Hmmm, conservatives need to play this game and use words to our advantage. From now on, I’ll refer to abortionists as baby-butchers, liberals as society-wreckers, and democrats as demonic-asses. No more nice labeling.
A couple of words I have come across recently are new to me:
intersectionality [has something to do with the fem movement]
woke [as in ‘woke’ comedian]
Then, there are the rules changes — such as ‘cultural appropriation’ being bad, whether it is eating a certain food or wearing certain clothing, etc.
It began with ‘Pro-Choice’ rather than ‘Pro-Abortion’.
Yep, hard to keep up.
I was called out recently for talking of “Orientals” and “American Indians”.
I was also called out from saying something about “homosexuality”.
You can be chastised even if you are not trying to be pejorative.
I used to chart it like this:
Colored >> Negro >> Afro-American >> African-American >> Black >> People of Color.
The modern skew may have started with “gay”. Certainly doesn’t mean what it once did.
SJW (Social Justice Warrior) is one of the more recent.
People of Color (or POC) means everybody who’s not “white”.
And “white” seems to change daily, too. Sometimes there can be a “white Hispanic” (George Zimmerman) or they can be “brown” people of color.
The latest seems to be the word “gender”. People do not have “genders”, they have a biological “sex” that is determined at conception.
Wittgenstein bump
Bookmark
A Native American woman told me that she is not offended at being called an Indian. However, I explained to her that I use the term for precision, as I know several Indians who are racially and culturally distinct from Native Americans. I wish there were another word to describe them, since the term "Native American" also is imprecise. I'm a native, my ancestors all immigrated in the 1600s.
Yes, and the left sets the terms of the debate as soon as it hits the media, with the help of the media. Republicans always fall for it.
This is quite an impressive piece of writing.
Here, I think, is his most important idea:
“By separating gender from sex, linguistic activists tore the very fabric of mutual understanding, and created a new class of victims, and by definition, a new class of offenders.”
The Left wages some high level psychological warfare. They make what is normal, abnormal and then demonizes people who continue to embrace social norms. . The Left then rushes in as heroes and accumulates power.
Frankfurt School English Class:
Control the language, control the debate.
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