Since the dawn of the twentieth century, words have been especially susceptible to the hammer blows of fashion and ideological propaganda.   The all-time master word-smiths (in the sense of my metallurgical metaphor—i.e., forgers of language) have been the leaders and apparatchiks of the former Soviet Union, who knew all too well that the abuse of power begins with the abuse of ordinary discourse. The Soviet Ministry of Information could always be depended upon to disseminate misinformation. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm or Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, war in Communist-Speak meant peace, peace meant war, wealth meant poverty, the dictatorship of the proletariat meant servitude, national liberation meant colonial enslavement, democracy meant tyranny.

Notwithstanding the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it is astounding how many of the perverted usages of International Communism have survived and conquered the supposedly victorious West, where they continue to be employed by the intellectual elites with much the same meaning, and absolutely no sense of irony, embarrassment, or regret.

The first three entries on the current list belong to this category. The next two exemplify the remarkable illiteracy of contemporary journalists. Then follow a few of the more amusing errors in contemporary usage.

 

1. Progressive

“Progressive” is one of those terms of self-congratulation that have become popular, by no mere coincidence, since the beginning of the Me-Generation . It is the descriptor by which individuals and movements on the Left universally compliment themselves, notwithstanding that “progressive” was the quasi-official adjective used in the propaganda of the USSR to describe Soviet policy (e.g., the internment of dissenters in concentration camps, which, one supposes, was necessary for the “progress” of the Revolution). In the same way, post-Soviet “progressives” reason that multi-generational welfare-dependency, larger deficits, and the relentless growth of government and its powers, also contribute to “progress”.

One can’t argue with progress, of course; it follows that no one can argue with the proposals of “progressives”.   Those who do so are “reactionaries”, who presumably espouse such ideas and policies as they do only because they think and hope that they will make things worse.

2. Liberal

“Liberal” derives from the Latin adjective liber, meaning “free”. In the eighteenth century, a “liberal” was an advocate of the freedom of the individual, and especially, of his freedom from the tyranny of the State. By contrast, liberals today (as opposed to libertarians) invariably believe in government as a power for good, if not the solution to all our problems. In truth, they ought to call themselves “illiberals”; but like “progressive”, “liberal” is another term of self-approbation. Today, the only real “liberals” are reactionaries.

3. Compassion and Greed

For liberals and progressives, “compassion” means being generous to the less fortunate, with other people’s money. Those few who now produce their own wealth, do not depend upon government (i.e., the taxpayer) for their sustenance, and wish to keep what they have earned, are “greedy”. All wealthy capitalists are greedy, except for Hollywood liberals, activist pop stars, and the fabulously—stratospherically–wealthy such as Bill Gates, George Soros, and Warren Buffett, all of whom advocate higher taxes for the “rich”, having already found a way not to pay them, or having so much money that raising taxes makes little difference to them. Members of public sector unions, government bureaucrats, community activists, arts groups, welfare recipients, and all other professional sucklings at the public breast (i.e., those who live at the expense of wealth-producing capitalists), when they demand higher wages, increased State funding, or more generous welfare benefits, are, by contrast, never greedy, but only appealing to the minimum standards of social justice and compassion.

4. Cheek by Tongue, Tongue in Jowl,…Whatever

Commenting on the extraordinary architectural density of Lunenburg, N.S., the narrator of a TVO documentary observed that the houses had been built “teeth by jowl”.

5. His and Hers

From an AP report in The National Post, Sat., June 28:

An official with the conservative Tea Party movement who was charged with conspiring to take photos of the wife of Mississippi Senator Thad Cochrane in her nursing home apparently killed himself Friday, police said, days after her husband beat off right-wing challenger Christ McDaniel to win the Republican primary… 

He “killed himself…days after her husband beat off right-wing challenger…”? Even in this age of same-sex marriage, “he” can’t be married to “her husband”.  Confused? So was I on the first several readings. The problem is the rather distant antecedent of “her”. But coherence is not to be hoped for from a graduate of journalism school.

6. Grow

Every politician promises to “grow the economy”.  In terms of usage, this ugly phrase demonstrates that more and more people are now tone-deaf to idiom: i.e., the sometimes arbitrary and unfortunate fact that, in every language, certain words go together and others don’t. You can grow soybeans, roses, hair, a beard, a tail, or wings; you can grow proud, lazy, rich, tall, fat, or simply grow.   But you can’t “grow” an economy.

7. Reticent

“Reticent” means “taciturn”, “inclined to silence”, or “reluctant to communicate”.   One can be reticent (i.e., reluctant) in relation to speech, but not action. When did reticent become a universal synonym for hesitant?

8. “Deep-seeded”

A recurrent malapropism for “deep-seated” that has spread tap-roots everywhere. One can, I suppose, sow seeds deeply (yielding “deep-seeded” crops), but the intended locution, “deep-seated”, has a different meaning.

Long, long before the structuralists, post-structuralists, semioticians, and deconstructionists made the discovery that there is an often tenuous relationship between words and what they signify (taking possession of the academic sandbox ever since), their dubeity was already old-hat. The Sophists of the fifth century B.C. were doubtful that words could have fixed and objective meanings, until Plato answered them. The Skeptics, Cynics, and Stoics reaffirmed the old sophistical reservations, until the Middle and Neo-Platonists answered them. In the high Middle Ages, the problem of language reasserted itself in the controversies between the so-called Nominalists and Realists.

Beyond this, both the ancient Greeks and medieval Christians were well aware that one could use words with a conscious and deliberate ambiguism. A well-known definition of allegory (by the early seventh-century encyclopedist and Bishop, Isidore of Seville) was “saying one thing to mean another.” Poets, prophets, sibyls, and mystics employed language in this way as a matter of vocation; and of course, being the Author of Scripture, God was the Arch-Allegorist. (In using words that say one thing while meaning another, the current generation of speakers and writers may also be called allegorists, except that they are usually unconscious of their duplicity.)

Then there is the use of words to mean precisely their opposite:  for instance, when Chaucer calls his Pardoner “a noble preacher” or the Wife of Bath a “good wife”, or when Moliere’s Alceste heaps praise on the poetic doggerel of a hopeless hack. The rhetoricians have called this trope by many names, including “irony” and “sarcasm”, and it remains to this day a useful route of escape from difficult social situations.

In their essays, today’s undergraduates not only regularly choose the wrong words, but, in their casual and arbitrary selection of them–on the assumption that any word can be imperially commanded to mean whatever they have in mind–, they very often hit upon exactly the wrong word: i.e., the word that means the diametrical opposite of what they intend. The first number on Today’s List illustrates this uncanny facility:

 

     Enervate, enervated, enervating, as in, “Mayor Ford’s brilliant performance in the debates seems to have enervated his campaign.” Au contraire, “to enervate” means “to lessen the vitality or vigour of”, “to unnerve”. The contemporary abusers of “enervate” seem to think it means “energize”, an error worthy of Mrs. Malaprop or Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella character. (Never mind.)

     Aggravate, aggravated, aggravating, aggravation, as in, “You’re aggravating me”, or “I don’t need the aggravation.” Knowing a little French, or even less Latin, would go a long way toward the understanding and proper usage of this shopworn word. The French grave means “serious”, the Latin gravis, “heavy, burdensome, grievous, or important”. (Hence our adjective “grave”, and our noun “grave”—residing in which is the gravest human situation of all). The Latin verb aggravare, aggravatus means “to make heavier”. Thus in English, “to aggravate” is “to make worse, more serious, more severe”. One cannot therefore “aggravate” a person (though one can aggravate his mood—his annoyance or irritation).

     They, as in, “Honey, someone from the office left a message, but the line was bad; I think they said something about sexual harassment.” “They” is the third-person-plural personal pronoun; it requires, accordingly, a plural antecedent. The caller (singular) cannot have been a “they”. The contemporary use of “they” to mean “someone” or “something”, i.e., a person or entity of unknown identity, is a breach of kindergarten grammar.

     So, as in, “Thank you so much”, or “I am so sorry”, or “That was so delicious”, or (more imaginatively contemporary), “If Britney comes near Hunter, I am so going to scratch that shank’s eyes out.” By itself, “so” confirms a previously mentioned action or idea; it means “this/that”, “in this/that way”, as in “I think so”, or “Do so”. When employed as an adverbial modifier of an adjective, however, it introduces a clause or phrase. Thus, not “I am so sorry”, but “I am so sorry for offending her that I will don a hair shirt and retire to a monastery”, or “His injury was so serious as to have hospitalized him for a month” (cf. Fr. tant…que).  When contemporaries say “so sorry” or “so good”, they mistake our word for an intensifier: what they mean is “I am very sorry…”

     To go, to be, as in, “Then he went, ‘Let’s have another vodka’, and I went, ‘But we’ve had six already’”, or (from one Flynn McGarry, fifteen-year-old prodigy chef, as recorded in The National Post), “People are always, like, ‘You shouldn’t mark what you want by someone else’s standards’—like three Michelin stars or four New York Times stars—but it’s kind of like a goal to look up to…” When I grew up, “to go” meant (kind of like) “to move, leave, depart”; “to be” (kind of like) “to exist”. Neither meant “to say”.

–What do you read, my lord?

        –Words, words, words.

 

It is now widely acknowledged–by others than merely radical reactionaries such as myself—that the state of English usage has reached an all-time low. If English were a person, he would be sipping his dinner through a straw in the palliative care unit of the state hospital.

The current generation’s inability to speak or write is usually ascribed to its addiction to technology; but the abbreviations and neologisms of techno-babble are merely the late-born symptoms of a disease whose gestation and aetiology hearken back to a time well before the advent of personal computers and video games. Its incubation began in the Sixties, with the pedagogical and ideological assault on grammar, syntax, spelling, usage, and diction prosecuted by savants who regarded these conventions as fascistic impositions on the autonomy and spontaneous creativity of youth. Little Johnny is a flower, it was said; do not step on him, and do not fence him in. Since then, we have reaped a weedy harvest of creativity; my undergraduates are so creative that they are severally the inventors of their own proprietary systems of syntax and orthography, and use words with less relation to any standard dictionary meaning than to their own subjective and varying moods.

Until now, words have tended to acquire fixed meanings through a tacit consensus arrived at freely over the centuries by the users of a language for their mutual benefit: i.e., so that interlocutors might understand one another. But unitary and universally agreed-upon meanings are now as passé as heterosexual marriage. “Alternative lifestyles” and alternative definitions of words go together like a horse and carriage.

In spite of the flexibility of their diction, however, it is interesting that today’s linguistic free spirits have an alarmingly meager vocabulary, and seem to depend, en masse and by default, upon a very small number of locutions. Every generation has its clichés, of course, but clichés become shopworn and ubiquitous only because they express some universally comprehensible idea or truth.   (I.e., they communicate more or less fixed universally accepted meanings.) Today’s reflexive usages are probably too faddish to ever achieve the venerable dignity of clichés, and in any case, are too creative to signify.

 

Beginning with this post, and sporadically in the future, I will exorcise my indignation against some of the more irritating barbarisms in current parlance. I know there is nothing original in what follows; but then, originality (as per the above) is one of the plagues of contemporary culture.

Today’s list:

     Quote, as in “I love this quote…It goes something like this…”. No, what you love (and remember vaguely) is a passage, a verse, a sentence, a phrase, a maxim, a proverb, an aphorism, a dictum, a logion. Such loci, if memorable, might be collected in a book of quotations. Or, hearing someone recite “To be or not to be…”, one might observe cleverly that “That is a quotation from Hamlet.” A “quote” is an estimate, or bid on a job.

     Issue, as in “Fred can’t make lunch; he has an issue at home.” Now, if Fred is having an issue at home, he ought to forget about lunch entirely and go straight to the hospital to have it staunched. An “issue” is an effluence of liquid (cf. “the woman with an issue of blood”). Or it can mean a subject or topic of policy, discussion, debate, or controversy. What Fred has is a “problem”.

     Speak to, as in “The President will speak to the issue of health care during his press conference tomorrow.” No, one cannot speak to an impersonal noun; the President might “speak to” the members of the press; he might “speak about” health care; but but he can’t speak to it. What our speaker meant was that the President will “address” or “discuss” health care tomorrow.

     Fulsome, as in “President Obama offered a fulsome apology for misleading the American people when he promised that they could keep their health care.” Well, if the speaker meant that Obama’s apology was “offensive because of insincerity”, “fulsome” is the mot juste. But I take my quotation (see above) from the Associated Press, a regular apologist for Obama and his apologies. What the AP writer intended to convey was that the President’s apology was “total”, “without reservation” (cf. “full”). Out of the mouths of babes…

     Very unique, as in “Her golf swing is very unique.” Unique, maybe; but not very unique. Something that is “unique” (from unus, “one”) is the only one of its kind in the whole wide world. You can’t get more unique than that.   “Unique”, like other superlatives, is an absolute that does not admit of degrees, and therefore cannot be modified by an intensifier such as “very”.

     Perfect, as in you walk into a restaurant with your spouse, and your hostess inquires, “Where would you guys like to sit.” Your wife has by now gotten used to being addressed in masculine casual, and she indicates the table in the corner. To which your hostess replies approvingly, “Perfect”. An eternity later, your server arrives to take your order. “Have you guys decided.” (Yes, you’ve had enough time to decide on every leg of your upcoming European vacation.)  “I’ll have the rabbit”, says your wife. “Perfect”. “And I’ll have the octopus”, say you.  Also “Perfect”.   “And bring us a bottle of your cheapest house plonk.”  “Perfect”.

Freddy Couples’ golf swing is perfect; Handel’s Amen chorus is perfect; God is perfect. Our word is the capstone of an escalating hyperbole in which “good” or “fine” became “excellent”, then “amazing”, then “awesome”. Now everything is “perfect”. Next year, look out for “very perfect”; the year after, “totally perfect”.

The myth of progress, to which modern liberals glibly subscribe, imagines that the present is ineluctably better—more enlightened, more compassionate, more egalitarian, more just–than the past; and that the future will be ineluctably better than the present. Progressives are always intoning the mantras of “change”, “hope”, and the “future”. While they deride any such superstitious fantasies as Paul’s “faith in things unseen”, that is precisely what their faith in the future amounts to. And though they are reflexively skeptical about the past, only the past, ontologically speaking, possesses substantial reality. The future has none. (Even the present, which they also extol–as in the injunction to “live in the moment”–has no empirical status. The present is an infinitesimally narrow line of division between past and future: a mere mathematical concept.)

It’s easy to demand change when the collateral offered is the gauzy promise of a “better future”. (Try that with your bank manager.) But progressives never tell us precisely what that future will look like. The question they must be made to answer, as Joseph Sobran has insisted, is in what kind of society they would be conservatives.

Liberals assume that traditional social arrangements, religious institutions, and moral and philosophical ideas are atavisms preserved only by a cravenly uncritical acceptance of authority, or a blind intellectual conformity. Their antinomianism is worn as the badge of a fearless and heroic independence of mind. Yet practically every major progressive initiative has been the product of mass sentiment, and thereafter celebrated as the triumph of the collective “will of the people”.   Once victorious, the progressive herd of independent minds has betrayed a depressingly ruthless habit of eliminating dissent: from the Gulag, to the speech codes of the modern Academy, to the heresy trials of global warming “deniers” or the defendants arraigned before our human rights tribunals. Today, major sectors of society—the educational establishment; journalism; the television, film, and music industries; the arts and literary community; the public unions and functionaries of the Welfare State—are hothouses of progressive ideological purity, hermetically sealed against contamination by even a spore of non-conforming opinion.

If traditions survive, on the contrary, it’s usually because, as the end-product of centuries of social and moral experimentation and amelioration, they have been proven to work. In this regard, conservatives are the real skeptics; they demand empirical evidence of the efficacy of “alternative lifestyles” before they are prepared to make the leap into the beyond.

In their attitude toward the past, conservatives thus also show a far deeper respect for the mores and opinions of “ordinary people” than those who are constantly lecturing them on their supposed “elitism”. It was Chesterton who famously defined tradition as “the democracy of the dead”. He might have taken the next step and defined modern liberalism as the tyranny of those who happen at this moment to be alive.

It is a natural human tendency, of course, to perceive one’s own historical period in exquisite focus and detail, and esteem it accordingly, while The Rest of History recedes like the background of an Early Netherlandish painting into the mists of obscurity. Every generation tends to regard its advent as the long-awaited fruition of the world-process. But the perspective of the current generation has become so foreshortened that its members seem to think and live as though the world were created the day they were born. That perspective is the temporal equivalent of the geographical self-centricity of Manhattanites, as it was famously satirized on the cover of an old New Yorker magazine, whose cartoon mappa mundi showed Manhattan, in exquisite focus and detail, occupying most of the frame, the Hudson River on its edge, and beyond that, in a narrow band, New Jersey and The Rest of the World.

The historical Narcissism of those who happen at this moment to be alive has become so overwhelming that our contemporaries can hardly imagine that things could ever have been different, or that humans once believed or behaved other than they do now. After listening to a lecture on the House of Pride in Book I (canto iv) of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a perplexed young undergraduate approached my desk to inquire, “Do you mean that pride isn’t a good thing?” No, pride is a capital sin, and has been counted as such for at least the previous three millennia of Western Civilization–with the exception, that is, of the past fifty years. But then, having been taught that everyone is “special” (but never having been taught to reason that, ergo, no one is special); having received prizes for losing; having watched videos of the Pride Parade, year after year, in her Sexual Diversity Class; and having graduated magna cum sua laude from Self-Esteem High, one can hardly blame my student for thinking of pride as an immemorial virtue.

 

Readers of these pages will be familiar with the traditional Western credendum that wisdom, happiness, and self-realization depend upon a man’s living a life of reason in control of his passions, rejecting the spurious goods and pleasures of the senses and the world, while contemplating the higher intelligible realities sometimes designated by the felicitous Pauline phrase invisibilia Dei. These moral presuppositions remained unchanged from the birth of Greek philosophy in the sixth-century B.C. down, at least, to the beginning of the Romantic Period. In the relatively brief time since then, their opposites have become settled norms, accepted without question in spite of their callow novelty. Today, we are all disciples of the Playboy School of Philosophy, in spite of the social and psychological carnage it has wrought. And with what seems to me a breathless lack of intellectual humility, the moral attitudes that prevailed universally in the West for centuries are dismissed as unnatural, morbid, or impossible. No one (as I am assured repeatedly by my students and acquaintances) could have actually lived in indifference to, or denial of, the flesh and the world.

I am consoled to have come across a passage from the great early twentieth century classicist, Gilbert Murray, which muscularly refutes such modernist prejudices. About Platonism and Stoicism (the two principal schools of thought from Hellenistic times right down to the dawn of modernity), Murray asserts that

…amid their differences there is one faith which was held by both in common. It is the great characteristic faith of the ancient world, revealing itself in many divergent guises and seldom fully intelligible to modern men; faith in the absolute supremacy of the inward life over things external. These men really believed that wisdom is more precious than jewels, that poverty and ill health are things of no import, that the good man is happy whatever befall him, and all the rest. And in generation after generation many of the ablest men, and women also, acted upon the belief. They lived by free choice lives whose simplicity and privation would horrify a modern labourer, and the world about hem seems to have respected rather than despised their poverty. To the Middle Age, with its monks and mendicants expectant of reward in heaven, such an attitude, except for its disinterestedness, would be easily understood. To some eastern nations, with their cults of asceticism and contemplation, the same doctrines have appealed almost like a physical passion or a dangerous drug running riot in their veins. But modern western man cannot believe them, nor believe seriously that others believe them. On us the power of the material world has, through our very mastery of it and the dependence which results from that mastery, both inwardly and outwardly increased its hold. Capta ferum victorem cepit. We have taken possession of it, and now we cannot move without it.

In our pyrrhic victory over the material world, as Murray observes, we have been taken captive by it. The image of our captivity to and in the corporeal order, so edifyingly expressive of our modern predicament, is itself, one should note, a venerable Platonist topos.