Own Your Language
It belongs to all, not the radicals
The Word I’m watching with some anxiety: LANGUAGE
“We, (the British and Americans) are two countries separated by a common language.”
G.B. Shaw, wit and playwright
Ah, yes, those were the days when we could chortle at jokes about mutual misunderstanding based on what the word ‘fag’ or ‘pants’ meant in the UK or the USA.
Nowadays, with language utterly politicized, what we decide to call things is a matter of life and death. Take the word ‘terrorist’, which as I write this is getting a makeover from Starmer’s government because of an inconvenient knifing on a train yesterday. So far all we know for sure is that two people are dead and that the police are praising their quick, 8 minute response time. However, they clearly do not wish this ‘incident’ to be categorized as a ‘terrorist’ attack; for political reasons. Nobody is talking about this semantic killing except TOUSITV, an independent news station run by an Iranian expat stationed in London. Here he is, Mayhar Tousi, laying it all out for us. And be warned: he is not even attempting to be ‘impartial’, but I prefer this kind of naked honesty to the duplicity of the ‘mainstream media’.
Historians tell us that when the language of a civilization gets bowdlerized, distorted and otherwise abused, its days are numbered. I am guessing our days are numbered because not only do we vehemently disagree about everything as you can see in the above clip and everywhere you care to look, we don’t even use the same language though it all sounds like English. The Language Extremists, especially the ‘progressives’ who are totalitarian bullies, wouldn’t want it any other way. Because it suits their purposes, they simply misuse it and take a metaphorical axe to it, hacking away meaning as they go and substituting their own misbegotten one.
A disturbing Canadian example is the recent ‘incident’ in Maillardville, a francophone enclave of Vancouver recently. It was so outrageous it made headlines though the offending document in and of itself would under normal circumstances never ever be considered of interest, it being a bureaucratic list of executive members sent by the local NDP Party in which the word ‘women’ was replaced by a non word, ‘non-male’. It became infamous because, as the AI Overview puts it so nicely:
The user’s input “Maillardville not male” appears to be referencing a recent news story where an email from the New Westminster - Burnaby - Maillardville chapter of the NDP party classified its executive members into “male” and “non-male” categories
. The phrase “Maillardville not male” likely points to this controversial use of the term “non-male” in the context of the riding association’s communication.
I will spare you the names of these non-males, who are actually females, that is, women. Why did the ruling NDP, a party that is increasingly unpopular in BC and a non-party federally, do such a crazy thing? Simply because they know that by changing the language they change the game of how you understand the world around you. If you’re a radical activist hell-bent on changing your society, you attack the basis of it, the very language that people use and take for granted. The NDP has always claimed to represent the common people, the blue collar workers. Clearly they’ve forgotten to ask these very people about deleting women and welcoming in ‘non-males’.
What this is really about is an attack on the fundamental fact of two sexes, which certain members of the ‘trans community’ want to eradicate so we can all be equal and wonderfully identical. Like sexless amoebas perhaps. So by simply eradicating the word woman, lo and behold, we are supposedly entering a sexless utopia. Well done guys or should I say, males and non-males. It’s dangerous nonsense that is driving deep divisions in our society though it’s certainly not coming from the grass roots; it’s an obsession of certain elites. Also, a trend that’s been gaining traction. And since Elites have the power to ‘move the needle’, we, the normies who are getting shoved around by these arrogant (expletive) must strongly decline speaking or thinking or taking part in this language demolition derby. Language is what humans do, so this is an attack on the very basis of our humanity, nothing less.
Let’s bring in the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein here, who says that when you’re speaking a certain language you’re actually playing a verbal game whose rules are set in the grammar and syntax, what the words mean and thereby delivering an entire way of thinking and acting without the user necessarily being aware of it. He felt that our only hope of arriving at truth is to free ourselves from ‘the bewitchment of language’. He was a fascinating figure belonging to an astonishing family, as a recent biography shows.
In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he wrote while on military service in the 1914–18 war, Wittgenstein proclaimed that the problems of philosophy arise only because “the logic of our language is misunderstood.” Once this logic had been laid bare, the problems would be resolved once and for all, or so he then believed. He later came to think of philosophy as a never-ending form of therapy: it will be a continuing “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
Wittgenstein must be spinning in his grave because we appear to be more ‘bewitched’ by words than ever before. In fact, words have been declared ‘violence’ by the radical Left, so now we are all supposed to tiptoe around them as if they were literal hand grenades that could at any moment detonate and destroy your worldview. And in a way, they are correct: words and their meanings, connotations and synonyms are hugely important, just not in the way they believe. And turning words into literal weapons is a game that will not end well.
It’s only when you learn other languages that you realize that it’s the very blueprint for how you see and experience the wold, and anyone who messes around with this should be stopped, immediately, especially if it’s the government or any other bureaucratic entity. And here is the scariest part: Dictionaries are written based on something called general usage; in other words, the more we tolerate this kind of language, the more acceptable it becomes and finally, the abused language ends up as new words in the Dictionary itself.
We should have realized that when they—the government—arbitrarily changed the definition of the word ‘vaccine’ they were up to no good and were in fact pulling the collective wool over our terrified eyes. We know that now, but the new definition stands. It has not been corrected. This is power over the people, not by the people, and it is growing. The Woke Cult is expert at using this handy dandy way of dividing and confusing us. Entire word groups suddenly mean something different or opposite, making reasonable conversation about topics like gender, freedom of speech or peaceful protests impossible if not downright frightening. We may all be speaking English but in fact, the lingua franca of the world is getting fractured into these sub languages that distort a like a cracked mirror, twisting meaning beyond normal recognition. Pace Shaw, this is no longer a laughing matter.
We, the educated writing community, have spent countless words bemoaning the fact that small languages are dying everywhere and how sad that is. I agree, it is a loss. A recent article in The Spectator goes on and on about it. But it never once mentions the fact that the most prolific language in the world is itself under attack by its own users. That it is in fact threatening to crack up, go insane, become unfit for purpose. Someone should really write about that because it’s a global concern for millions of English speakers.
What is to be done? Protect your language rights by speaking up when someone uses it in abusive manner that distorts reality. We must not let these radicals destroy what makes us humans able to talk to each other. To debate things without wanting to kill each other. When you attack language you attack the best in us. It is crazy making and unfortunately, too many people in the name of tolerance put up and shut up. Especially here in backward Canada. That is a profound mistake. Somehow, we must find the courage to speak up for our language. Because as I understand it, our very civilization and sanity depends on it.