This is my review in Goodreads of the book “Studies in Words” by C.S.Lewis:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1153208780
Regards,
Clearly I need to read Studies in Words, though I believe I’ve seen it quoted. This section in particular appears to be prescient:
The last chapter, which serves as a corollary, provides a deep analysis of the way in which words are “killed” by charging them with emotional content and emptying them of meaning.
I believe this is the section I’ve seen quoted, to the effect that, e.g., “gentleman” has changed meaning from “a land-owning man of a certain class” to, essentially, “a man of whom I approve.” But this problem is epidemic today, at least in American society. I believe it’s of far greater prevalence than the COVID pandemic, though whether it’s more or less deadly remains to be seen.
Take the word “racism.” My dictionary[1] defines this as:
n. 1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usu. involving the idea that one’s own race is superior. 2. a policy, system of government, etc., based on such a doctrine. 3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.
But now that definition has been changed, such that it can only be attributed to a person with “power”. An “oppressed” person cannot, by definition, be racist[2]. Thus, every white person is, by definition, racist, while it is impossible for a black person, also by definition, to be racist.
The same is true of other loaded terms. A man[3] is automatically a sexist and misogynist; it’s impossible for a woman to be either.
Worse yet is that this has deeply infected the church. Many words have suffered this fate there, but the greatest casualty is probably “justice.” I wonder if we should start to march for justice for the words senselessly murdered…
Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. New York: Random House, 1995. I’d love to use the OED, but I don’t have one handy. ↩︎
Both “power” and “oppression” have also been redefined, such that they no longer say anything about the person concerned, but only about the group to which he belongs. Thus, the last President of the United States was an oppressed person by virtue of being a black man. ↩︎
Unless it’s a woman who thinks she’s a man, in which case she may get a pass. ↩︎
Dan Brown via SpareOom (<noreply@talk.spare-oom.com>) escribió:
I believe this is the section I’ve seen quoted, to the effect that, e.g., “gentleman” has changed meaning from “a land-owning man of a certain class” to, essentially, “a man of whom I approve.” But this problem is epidemic today, at least in American society. I believe it’s of far greater prevalence than the COVID pandemic, though whether it’s more or less deadly remains to be seen.
Yes, “killed” words, according to Lewis, are words that pass from meaning something concrete (as in the “gentleman” example you mention) to just becoming useless synonyms of “good” or “bad.” Another example he deals with is “damn,” which from being loaded with meaning (someone going to hell) becomes a mere expletive indistinguishable from a groan, which someone utters when he has lost the train.
In fact, Lewis complains that the number of words killed in this way is accelerating. The other examples you have offered show that he was right. If we go on like this, soon all languages will be useless, as most words will have been killed.
This problem does not affect only the US, I think it’s a mostly global situation. At least in most of Europe, although I cannot warrant that it also affects Asiatic countries.
Regards,
Dan Brown via SpareOom (<noreply@talk.spare-oom.com>) escribió:
The same is true of other loaded terms. A man is automatically a sexist and misogynist; it’s impossible for a woman to be either.
I’m not sure of this, look at the attacks against J.K. Rowling when she declared herself against transsexuality.
Regards,
Well, yes, “trans” is more “oppressed” than a white woman. But she wasn’t deemed “sexist”, but rather “trans-phobic.”
And I think the ultimate irony of the “Black Lives Matter” movement is that it does a great deal of harm to black lives, because it tends to keep the police from responding forcefully against black criminals, who then feel more empowered to kill or mistreat their own. This is precisely what happened in Baltimore after the death in police custody of Freddie Gray in 2015. It didn’t matter that half of the police involved were black. Any time a black person dies in police custody, it must automatically be considered an instance of racism. The lawsuit against the police was subsequently thrown out of court by a black judge. But meanwhile crime in Baltimore’s black neighborhoods rose dramatically. And there are black people who speak of these obvious things, but are more or less ignored by much of the media.
Dimitry
“Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever.” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8)
In re racism, there are some Southern Whites who were and are AGAINST slavery because it brought blacks into the South! While speaking to one of them he told me that “we should have picked our own cotton instead of bringing blacks here to do it!”. There is also a joke in which one of them is given a wish, to which he replied that he wanted all blacks to be sent back to Africa!
Sincerely,
Forrest
Further irony is that they have no rational, consistent explanation for why black (or any, really) lives matter. They loudly affirm it, they riotprotest under very limited circumstances when one is taken, but they can’t explain it. As Christians, we can–black lives matter because they, like all other human beings, bear the image of God. And as such, they matter in exactly the same way, and to exactly the same degree, as any other human life.
Yes, racism (see above for a quite serviceable definition) does exist. Some white people are racist. Some black people are racist (and some of those are getting applause for statements, the like of which no white person would dare make in a public setting). It’s a sin which must be repented of, regardless of the skin color of the person committing it. It’s a violation of the greatest commandment (it fails to love God in that it despises his image in his creation) and the second-greatest (in that it fails to love one’s neighbor as oneself).
While I was getting ready to join the discussion on verbicide, the topic veered off into current affairs. I am going to resist commenting on that, and go back to the murder of words.
Years ago, the New York Times had a fascinating article of what happens to words once they enter the language, showing that changes were always downward…less specific, less complimentary, and so forth. I am sure I have the article…somewhere.
Lewis tells us that all meaning in language comes from the knowledge our five senses give us. The more abstract the word, the less meaning. Abstract and general words with little concrete meaning are more easily manipulated. Secondly, this discussion calls to mind George Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language. What I dimly recalled from that essay was that Orwell makes the point that the decay of language leads to the decay of thought. That led to thinking about Lewis’s tenet that it is images that move us, not words. From the systematic theologians, we learn that God is omnipresent. omniscient, impassible, and so forth. From His Own Word to us, we learn that He is a shelter, a rock, the arms that catch us when we fall, the wings that shelter us, the light that guides us, the Shepherd we follow…just for starters.
BUT I just googled that essay, barely glanced at it, and discovered that Orwell says much the same thing! Here’s a quote from this excellent essay: “When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.”
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O very good! I enjoyed the quote from Orwell too.
It brings to mind a short discussion I had on social media recently, re a certain female politician here, who is uneducated, as well as being a very nasty, racist person.
When a humanitarian lawyer criticised her speech, he was in turn criticised for being " classist".
This annoyed me so deeply that I responded, and tried unsuccessfuly to explain the need for not allowing language to decay. I was of course then labelled classist myself.
When we succumb to this " dumbing down" of not only language, but thought, we lose mental competence. It is a constant source of grief to me.
Carolyn in OZ
…which results in a different form of verbicide, one in which a perfectly meaningful word may no longer be used because it’s deemed offensive. The example that comes most immediately to mind is “niggardly”:
adj. 1. reluctant to give or spend; stingy; miserly. 2. meanly or ungenerously small or scanty: a niggardly tip to a waiter. –adv. 3. in the manner of a niggard.
But due to the obvious similarity in sound to another word, despite having no connection in its etymology to that word, this word is now also verboten.
Well, I guess the “gentleman” and “Christian” examples, cited by Lewis, are examples of words becoming more complimentary but less useful.
Two murdered words I mourn for are:
-
“incredible” which now just means “amazing”, depriving me of a word for something that is not worthy of belief. Worse still, “Unbelievable” is going the same way!
By the way, the German and (Iberian) Spanish equivalents have been perverted in exactly the same way. Weird, eh? -
“discrimination” which now almost always means “unfair discrimination”, perhaps due to the internal syllable “crim”, as in “crime”. Come to think of it, here is a word becoming more specific.
And again, “Diskriminierung” in German has undergone exactly the same perversion.
Free Thulcandra!
Hyoi
Peter Brittain via SpareOom (<noreply@talk.spare-oom.com>) escribió:
Well, I guess the “gentleman” and “Christian” examples, cited by Lewis, are examples of words becoming more complimentary but less useful.
Two murdered words I mourn for are:
“incredible” which now just means “amazing”, depriving me of a word for something that is not worthy of belief. Worse still, “Unbelievable” is going the same way!
By the way, the German and (Iberian) Spanish equivalents have been perverted in exactly the same way. Weird, eh?“discrimination” which now almost always means “unfair discrimination”, perhaps due to the internal syllable “crim”, as in “crime”. Come to think of it, here is a word becoming more specific.
And again, “Diskriminierung” in German has undergone exactly the same perversion.
This post in my blog, which I wrote three years ago, gives more details about what Lewis says in his book about the destruction of language: https://populscience.blogspot.com/2017/07/destruction-language.html
Regards,
This can be avoided if you clearly state that the concept in question only APPEARS to be incredible, but actually ISN’T incredible; and is NOT unbelievable but only APPEARS to be unbelievable.
Or choose a less abstract word. From a post card, years ago, from my traveling mother: “I didn’t believe the Grand Canyon before I saw it, and now that I have seen it, I still don’t believe it.”
You can always just say “not believable” or “not credible.”
Undragoned by Aslan,
Elaine Turner
So then I guess that means you are a “classy lady” 
Dimitry
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Somehow the different Spare Oom emails got mixed up in my computer. I am here replying to the one on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which I remember very well even though I saw the TV shows when they were first shown, all the way back in the 1960s (when I was a twenty-something), which I have never forgotten, even though I am now 80 years of ago (and will be 81 next month). Also in the 1960s I read almost all of Lewis’s writings and TWICE I followed his advice about the best teacher being the one to recommend good books to read. During the mid and late sixties I read almost all the books (about Judaism and Jewish/Christian relations) recommended by a newly formed group in Philly called “Christians Concerned For Israel”, and all the books about race recommended by a friend who was an official in the National Black Evangelicals Association.
Forrest
This is odd! I can’t find the address for emailing to SpareOom! Don’t think I can have made a new message since Dan took it over, and my guesses are not working. Could some kind soul please tell me if this has arrived?
Thanks
Carolyn in OZ
I got it! Glad you have arrived!