Why Words Don't Mean Anything Anymore

Subscribe now 'Then they tell you about the pain-relieving ingredient; there's always got to be a lot of that. Nobody wants anything less than 'extra strength.' 'Extrastrength' is the absolute minimum. You can't evenget'strength'; 'strength' is out now. It'sall'extra strength.' Some people are not satisfied with 'extra'; they want 'maximum.' 'Give me the maximum strength.' 'Give me the maximum allowable human dosage.' 'Figure out what will kill me, and then back it off a little bit.'' — Jerry Seinfeld,I'm Telling You for the Last Time(1998) If it seems like words don't mean anything anymore, you aren't imagining things. You might have noticed, for example, that 'racism' used to mean prejudice, bigotry, or animus against racial or ethnic groups, but now it's simply a synonym for cultural conservatism.1Perhaps it has occurred to you that a decade ago, the term 'white supremacist' evoked imagery of men in Klan robes burning crosses or Edward Norton's character fromAmerican History X. Today, the label is used to describe half the country. As a result, when we hear the charge leveled, it doesn't quite land the way it used to, does it? Worse still, terms like 'Nazi' now mean precisely nothing at all, while 'Zionist' means something rather akin to what Nazioncemeant (while also being a code word for 'Jews'). Of course, this kind of linguistic hyperinflation has been going on for decades. Why make some turgid and sanctimonious critique of the way another subculture offends your Christian morality when you can just call them satanic devil worshippers? Maybe because it's not true?Oh, but it feels so good to say it.Why call someone a bleeding-heart liberal when you can call them a Marxist, socialist, or better yet, a communist? What's that? They don't actually want to seize the means of production or abolish capitalism? Who cares?It feels good to say it.Why call someone a country-club conservative when you can call them a reactionary, or better yet, a fascist? Don't let facts or fairness get in the way of those sweet, sweetfeels. I mean, what evenistruth anyway, amirite? The advertising world understood our burgeoning postmodern culture earlier than most in the 1980s and '90s. They saw how we gravitate toward spectacle, grandiosity, and superlative. They recognized that bigger is always better and that gratification should always be instant. And they reflected our inner desire for maximum indulgence and improvidence back at us: if it feels good,just do it. And so we have. Given the brazenness and sheer volume of his lies, and his capacity for inspiring in his followers a total apathy toward reality, Donald Trump is rightly acknowledged as the single largest contributor to our 'post-truth' era. But vast and pernicious though his influence has been, one man alone cannot drive the kind of deterioration we have seen in our political culture and language. In our desire to one-up each other, score rhetorical points,ownour opponents, signal allegiance to our tribe, and grab eyeballs in an increasingly saturated attention economy, we have all contributed to the pervasive concept creep taking place across the political lexicon. Progressives have contributed no shortage of examples. 'Harm' or being 'unsafe' now mean little more than 'disagreement' or 'discomfort.' 'Trauma' has become shorthand for any negative feelings whatsoever. 'Violence' now encompasses both wordsand'silence.' Left-wing culture warriors call the online backlashes to their antics 'abuse', while labeling their own public shaming campaigns as 'accountability.' Many progressive commentators also routinely characterize criticism as 'harassment' or 'targeted harassment', or declare that they are being 'targeted' as though they're Salman Rushdie, in order to curry sympathy and the coveted 'I'm so sorry this is happening to you' replies. This pattern has permeated the culture. As generations of social progress rendered the definition of 'patriarchy' untenable as a reality-based rallying cry for first-world feminists, the concept had to be expanded to keep the grievance alive. As such, 'patriarchy' no longer means a system of institutionalized sexism, male domination, and female exclusion, but rather any situation in which women are deemed to get the short end of the stick (while discounting all areas where the inverse is true). We hear well-connected people in the upper decile of income, education, and privilege speak of themselves with the language of 'oppression' and 'marginalization' because of their identity attributes. Conversely, 'colonialism' has mushroomed from the practice of expansionist nations taking control of other countries into something rather more like 'existing while white', with 'colonizer' functioning as a synonym for white people, and especially straight white males. The political right has also been busy broadening every term and concept descriptive of the progressive left in order to hurl at everyone to the left of Mussolini. The term DEI — short for diversity, equity, and inclusion; a framework adopted by organizations across the country to enact and enforce progressive identity politics — was used so indiscriminately by the right that it came to mean any left-of-center policy.Critical race theory(often shortened to CRT) took this same path, devolving from a specific school of far-left racial thought into basically any recognizably liberal attitude from the past 75 years. Similarly, 'woke' and 'wokeness', which referred to the illiberal cultural politics of the hard left, soon became a term of confusion, in part because progressives spent years insisting wokeness was simultaneously fictitious yet also good, and because the cultural right took to using the term to refer to anything politically left of themselves. On matters of immigration, the populist right collapsed the views of everyone from the center right to the far left into one undifferentiated mass. Anything short of drastic immigration cutbacks, mass deportations, and walling the country behind electrified ramparts defended by orbital rail guns is now 'open borders.' But for all that the right bloviates about 'law and order', it's very much a 'rules for thee but not for me' affair. Indeed, any attempt to hold right-wing politicians to account for actual crimes committed is dubbed 'lawfare', which until recently meant a deliberate misuse of the legal system for partisan political aims. Unsurprisingly, according to the rightmost third of the country, 'voter fraud' now means 'when Democrats vote', and 'rigged' or 'stolen' elections are when Democrats win. The 'deep state' refers not to shadowy, powerful, and unelected cabals embedded within the state, but to career civil servants and bureaucrats who resist rubber-stamping the often illegal and unconstitutional dictates of right-wing populists. Science has not been spared from these trends in linguistic inflation. Eugenics used to mean the authoritarian and pseudoscientific effort to improve the human race by controlling who could reproduce. Outside of history books, a 'eugenicist' today is apparently someone who studies or simply accepts the science of IQ, human intelligence, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology.2Interestingly, within the debate over trans politics, both sides accuse the other's preferred policies, especially pertaining to minors, as 'eugenics.' Likewise, 'phrenology', a long-defunct pseudoscience that believed human intelligence could be determined by measuring the size and shape of people's heads, and which was employed in service of racist ends, is also lobbed at anyone with the temerity to accept the well-establishedscientific consensusthat IQ islegitimate, predictive, and partly heritable.3 In some cases, activists appeared to follow the templates laid out by older examples. For close to 30 years, 'Islamophobia' has intentionally blurred the line between bigotry against Muslims and criticism of the religion of Islam. Taking a page from this book, 'transphobia' had hardly entered mainstream usage when it morphed into a cudgel to hammer anyone whose forehead did not audibly slap the pavement loudly enough while kowtowing to the glorious and infinite wisdom oftrans activism. Concept creep has also touched some of the most serious accusations and crimes that exist. 'Grooming', in a sexual context, is when an adult manipulates and/or lures a child in order to rape them. On the right, this term has become acatch-alltodenigrateeveryone from LGBT folks in general and trans people in particular to LGBT allies, progressives, liberals, Democrats, and anyone who dissents from the right-wing culture warrior ethos. On the left, accusations of grooming became woven into the prudish and puritanical obsession with the 'problematic' nature of 'age gaps' — which quite literally meantanyage gap, even a gap of just a few years between consenting adults. Accusations of pedophilia have been caught up in this same bipartisan pincer movement. Anyone even tangentially related to anything abstractly inappropriate involving minors — even if no one actually believes they are attracted to children or have committed any crimes — is increasingly open to charges of being a pedophile. Genocide, too, has undergone a dramatic evolution from being popularly understood as the wholesale slaughter, or attempted slaughter, of entire groups of people to something in between 'war casualties' and 'war crimes' generically — provided, of course, that they are carried out by a hated party. This broadening occurred so that left-wing activists, politicians, and NGOs could say thatIsraelwas committing 'genocide' against the people of Gaza. Along these same lines, apartheid used to refer to South Africa's internal institutionalized racial caste system — a sort of Jim Crow on steroids. Now it's been expanded by the NGO left into a more portable concept designed specifically to stretch and conform to every contour of the perennial Israel-Palestine conflict, even though it bears virtually nothing in common with apartheid South Africa. Other examples are, graded on this scale, more benign. A 'dog whistle', in the political context, used to mean carefully coded language meant to sound innocuous to the masses while covertly signaling something nefarious to a select group. Today, a 'dog whistle' is anything reminiscent of right-wing thought in any way and to any degree, which is another way of saying the term doesn't mean a damn thing. A 'grifter' is no longer a petty swindler or con artist, but someone you disagree with who is guilty of the unforgivable sin of… attempting to make a living — or, in some cases, just to gain attention or a non-monetized online following. Collectively, these criteria amount to 'any publicly expressed opinion I disagree with.' The role of the Internet in driving these trends has been undeniable. While language always has and always will shift over time, never before the social media era was it possible for words — sometimes important words concerning grave subjects that require care, precision, and specificity — to become utterly meaningless in a matter of months. This is not normal or healthy. In our collective desire (and now ability) to say things that attract attention, engagement, praise, or status, we have all, in our own way, becomeThe Boy Who Cried Wolf. Some of us thoughtlessly repeated language we didn't fully understand. Others knew better but chose to adopt a self-indulgent and relativistic attitude in which what's 'true' is whatever is useful in that moment. Now we face the collective action problem our behavior has produced: a tragedy of the commons in which the individual pursuit of maximum clout has resulted in the degradation of shared truth — the foundation upon which civilization itself rests. There's no great mystery to how we can stop being part of the problem and begin being part of the solution. We already know the answer, learned as children from our mothers: Thinkbefore you speak. See also: 'Memory-Holing 'Wokeness'' Share American Dreaming is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work onPatreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming onTwitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social onBluesky, or atAmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com. Cover image generated by ChatGPT. On some parts of the cultural left, racism has also come to mean anything that isn't 'anti-racist' (as 'anti-racists' define it), or any time there is a measured disparity between racial categories in which the (qualifying) minority group appears worse off. Some context: The leftist worldview has tended to be substantially underpinned by a heavy and at times near-exclusive reliance on the 'nurture' side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate. Leftism has been, and largely remains, hostile to the sociological and political implications of things like human nature and the heritability of certain traits, which often spills over into a hostility toward entire scientific fields dedicated to exploring these areas. These accusations are usually paired with references to 'calipers', a measuring tool once used by phrenologists to measure skulls, and still widely used today across medical and engineering fields.