To call it 'rape' is to debauch the language

In Manchester, a friend at university there tells me, a new word has entered smart parlance among the young. The word is ‘raped’.

The expression is moderately strong, and casual. It is a way of saying that one has in some way been done over, done for, or done in. ‘I was completely raped,’ a cool young Mancunian might remark, emerging from an examination in which the questions had proved impossible; or on discovering that something he had just bought was on sale much more cheaply elsewhere.

My friend added that some women were complaining that to use a word like this so lightly was offensive, as if rape could ever be equated with everyday problems or setbacks.

I see their point. My friend and I were talking about this not long after the newspapers had reported that in England and Wales alone, between 61,000 and 89,000 women a year are raped, according to a Home Office crime survey. One in 20 women — some three quarters of a million — said they had been raped at least once since they were 16. The survey had found that current partners were responsible for 45 per cent of rapes. Strangers accounted for 8 per cent. Women were most at risk from their partners, former partners, men they are dating and acquaintances.

At this point the reader pauses worriedly. In the old-fashioned (you could call it ‘classical’) idea of rape, the assailant is unknown, or almost unknown, to her victim. This, I suppose, is the image of a stranger assaulting you in the dark: one of the most frightening images of all. But of the offences included in the Home Office survey’s tally, 92 per cent were not of this kind. Nearly half (45 per cent) involved current partners. These people had been raped by, but had not afterwards left, their partners.

One’s unease here is provoked not by any wish to condone what these women are putting up with, but the language chosen to condemn it. If what they are choosing to overlook is rape, what word shall we use to describe the kind of assault which nobody could overlook? ‘Rape’ is losing its meaning. It has been violated by campaigners, desirous of taking for themselves and their cause the capacity which that word had to shock. Language is being, if not raped, debauched.

These campaigners’ campaign itself is just. They want to persuade us of what is true: that rape is more common than reported figures suggest. They also want to make the point that compulsion in sex is wrong, and to din it into the heads of the obtuse or unobservant that submission is not the same as consent. But to grab our attention they have cheated. They have taken one of the most powerful words in the English language, ‘rape’, and drawn and stretched it like a net, too wide, around too much. They have tapped in to the shudder this word always causes, so that we will shudder at other, sometimes different kinds of misdeed.

All of the wrongs which those three quarters of a million women reported were wrongs, many of them very serious: please accept that it is not my intention to question this. But within that global figure will have been a tremendously wide range of wrongdoing: wide in the surrounding circumstances, and wide in the comparative gravity of the different offences. Campaigners have hoped that the least serious will take their colour from the most. The danger is that the most serious will lose their colour to the least. The danger is that the word ‘rape’ will lose its power to shock.

Cheating with language is something we all do, but those with a burning sense of anger and of mission are particularly prone to the practice because they may feel that the justice of their cause outweighs quibbles about the use of English. In the end, however, we are all, including them, the losers.

Just as the word ‘rape’ has been raped, so the word ‘abuse’ has been abused. Rightly concerned to show that sexual interference with children is more widespread than we once thought, campaigners have chosen a word, ‘abuse’, which used to connote very serious interference, and applied it to a misbehaviour ranging from inappropriate (or inappropriately persistent) touching, to forced penetration. So, yes, in that weak sense, one in ten of us may have been ‘abused’ in childhood, but another abuse is of the much smaller number whose terrifying and life-twisting experiences have now been cheapened by being placed in the same category as the millions who in childhood noticed in passing that an adult’s behaviour was a bit funny.

Apartheid is ‘institutional racism’ because it incorporates racial discrimination into the fabric of the law. Sir William Macpherson was on less certain ground in talking about ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police: he achieved his headline but ‘endemic’ would have been a better term because he meant persistent attitudes among many officers, not the rules or structures of the force. The phrase loses potency further when people start talking about institutional racism in the BBC. Whatever racism there may be in the Corporation is plainly not incorporated: nothing explicit or implicit in its structure can be called racist. The phrase ends up meaning little more than ‘frequently’ or ‘habitually’ racist.

The same can be said of the word ‘poverty’. If it is used (in the phrase, for instance, ‘child poverty’) to mean no more than relative deprivation, then a minor cheat with language designed to make us sit up and think about inequality leads to irritation when, on reading the small print, we realise that not being able to afford new trainers is now taken as ‘poverty’. We end up cynical about the whole campaign, and dulled to what was once a powerful word. Where poverty does exist in Britain (and it does, but among a small and pitiful number of people) we are left with no word to describe the intensity of their plight.

‘Student poverty’ has become a new vogue-phrase too. My friend in Manchester may find himself complaining that he is living in poverty and often raped. He will have gained, for a few seasons, some temporarily colourful turns of phrase which will soon fade. And our language will have lost a little more of its power.

Continuous hyperbole tends to diminish the effect of any term. Look at what happened to the word "awesome." Its adoption by the brain-dead surfer set rendered it unfit for the learned lexicon.

"Rape" should be a word that conjures up ugly images and heart-sinking horror. A sale on handbags isn't likely to stir that depth of feeling in even the most avid shopper.

I was in London last August. While in a bar pounding down beers and talking to my wife I used the word "raped". I young Brit next to me leaned toward me and said "I wouldnt use that word in this country". And he was dead serious.

I asked him, "are your speech police going to come and get me?" He replied, "trust me, don't use that word."

Seems a year later it is all the rage. The guy who warned me probably liked how I used it and ran with it.

Very good point. Another word that has been rendered meaningless with overuse is "devastating".

"Incredible" now has a very different meaning than what it first meant, too. It used to mean "unbelievable" - now it just means "that's really, really cool".

The other one that really gets me is "gender". This word has nothing to do with whether a human being is male or female, but that is how everyone uses it these days. Gender is the way you classify inanimate objects in romantic languages like German and French, being either masculine or feminine (German also has neuter). For example, the German word for "Girl" is "Madchen". Now a girl is female, but the gender of the word "Madchen" is neuter. So even in those languages, it doesn't apply.

No one has a gender. If you have a Y chromosome, you are of the male sex, and if not, you are of the female sex. Remember that next time some liberal talks about "gender roles" and so on.

I remember high school days and the phrase 'he took off like a raped ape.' Other than that, rape meant rape, except for all the underage sex that was going on which, had the guy been older would have been rape statutorily but wasn't because he was within two years of her age. Uhm, maybe rape isn't so cut and dried after all.

In Manchester, a friend at university there tells me, a new word has entered smart parlance among the young.

That's the first mistake: giving a crap what some college ditz has to say. I will be so glad when we get away from these "in" words and phrases. Sometimes, they are okay, even clever. Most of the time, they are uttered by people I wouldn't care to emulate. The same goes for a LOT of things.

. In the old-fashioned (you could call it ‘classical’) idea of rape, the assailant is unknown, or almost unknown, to her victim.

Huh? Since when has rape only been perpetrated by strangers? Only a man could write such nonsense.

And, BTW, you don't have to be a victim of "date rape" to have been raped by someone who you know.

The type of rape you describe is always qualified with "statutory" to distinguish it from "forcible" rape. Nowadays, the PC police have caught up with the act of unlawful carnal knowledge, and it's become "sexual assault." But "forcible rape" is still a redundancy to most of us.

Very good point. Another word that has been rendered meaningless with overuse is "devastating".

And how about "horrific"? I get weary hearing the talking heads ('specially on Fox) use that word to describe every action they report. Whether a rainstorm in Texas or a massacre in Afghanistan.

My nomination for Abused Word of the Century is "discrimination." It used to be that a man of "discriminating" tastes was one refined enough to reject the tacky, the tawdry, the hauntingly mediocre. His was not the pedestrian palette, but one that excluded those coarse, boorish values that attracted the less elegant castes of society.

Now, it just means a bigot.

Well said. Go to this column for a whole article of words that have been hijacked by the Left. Indeed, the author said the same thing about "discriminating" as you did:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/741616/posts

Good point. I'd like to see' discriminate' used in its literal sense. If I am discriminatory in my selections, it doesn't mean I have insulted those I did not select. It is my right to make my own choices in life, and if the losers want to get offended, that's their problem. The fact that we cannot legally do this today is another indication of the atrocious trashing of our rights as Americans.

"Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed."--F. A. Hayek _The Road to Serfdom_, 1944.

It is my right to make my own choices in life

Not since Brown vs. Board of Education. Your right of free association has been overruled. And there are movements afoot to do the same thing in regard to homosexuals, lesbians, child molesters, and virtually every other pervert you can name.

Your "right" to be discriminating in your choice of company died 30 years ago.

Thank you. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one fighting the "gender vs. sex" battle. I lost points on a paper because I used the word "sex" in reference to male/female classification. The instructor wrote in the margin "Use gender". When I asked "What's wrong with sex?” she told me the accepted phrase is "gender discrimination". I replied, "Funny, I've never heard of gender harassment or gender preferences? Why is sex politically incorrect?”

I didn't get the points back (sigh). But I still prefer "sex" over "gender". Hell, I prefer sex over anything!

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