Words are the things we use to convey ideas. Words have meaning. If you have command of language, that’s a kind of power. But we don’t usually think about the dictionary writers as powerful. Mostly we don’t think about them at all.
Mr. Spherical Model and I watched a movie the other night about the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary. I’m undecided about recommending it, called The Professor and the Madman., with Mel Gibson as Professor James Murray, and Sean Penn as the madman, Dr. William Chester Minor. It was well done as a film, but because Dr. Minor (apparently in real life, according to the end credits) was seriously deranged, some scenes were hard to stomach. Anyway, Professor Murray was a Scottish autodidact, fluent in so many languages and dialects I couldn’t count them. And he happened to be kind of obsessive about tracking down the changes in the use of each word. It was a herculean task.
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| OED lexicographer James Murray (left) and OED contributor Dr. William Minor images from Wikipedia, here and here |
One approach was to enlist the reading public. He had a note
placed inside books sold in bookshops, asking people to note words and their
usage, identifying quotes where they were used, and send them in. One of these notes ended up in
the hands of a man in an insane asylum, who was very smart (a former surgeon)
with plenty of time on his hands. So he made huge contributions to the work.
If you go ahead and watch it, you’ll notice that, when a
word skipped a century or so and then reappeared, that didn’t mean the word
actually disappeared; they just hadn’t discovered how/where it was used during
those centuries. Professor Murray wouldn’t let go; he just kept up the search
until they found the links they needed.
The end credits mentioned that they were putting out about
750 pages a year, moving through the alphabet. I think they got up to around M
by the time Murray died in 1915. Dr. Minor, out of the asylum and returned to
America, continued to contribute until his death in 1920, when the project was
up to about T (I’m going by memory, so I may be off by several letters for each
of them). Begun in 1879, it took until 1928 to complete.
This was the unabridged version—everything there is to know
or ever was known about each word; it ran twelve volumes, and defined 414,825
words. Most dictionaries are abridged. They’re about giving you a quick answer
to the basic question, “What does this word mean?” There’s minimal history, pronunciation
guide, parts of speech, and useful meanings.
I don’t know who decides what gets into a dictionary and
what gets abridged (left out). Lexicographers are the people getting paid to do
the tasks, and I assume there’s some sort of hierarchy of decision-making as in
most fields.
But what you would not expect is for a dictionary to delete
a definition that is still fully in use—and is in fact the standard meaning
most speakers of the language assume when they hear the word.
But that is what has happened with this word: racism.
Joshua Philipp brought this up on his Crossroads Q&A[i]
last Thursday. He brought up a screenshot of the current
2021 online Merriam-Webster Dictionary for the word racism. It shows three main definitions:
1.
a
belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities
and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular
race.
2.
a.
the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and
political advantage of another.
2.
b.
a political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its
principles.
If you think about it, what you’ll find missing is the most
common understanding of the word: racial prejudice or discrimination—essentially
pre-judging someone negatively based on their skin color or race.
I often pull out my older dictionary for historical
perspective: Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition,
printed in 1982. In that one racism’s first meaning refers us to the variant racialism,
which has given way over the years to racism. But the main definition
there says:
1. a doctrine or teaching without
scientific support, that claims to find racial differences in character,
intelligence, etc., that asserts the superiority of one race over another or
others, and that seeks to maintain the supposed purity of a race or the races.
Then there’s a second meaning only under racism:
2. any program or practice of racial discrimination, segregation, etc. based on racialism.
from the Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1982
1. Why does the deletion of this basic meaning matter? It’s a bait and switch. They can’t implement policies against people based on their skin color and not be racist—unless they delete that definition and pretend the word means some systemic societal flaw. As Joshua Philipp puts it:
Why did they have to remove that?
Again, in order to frame these new narratives. Because, folks, they are
conducting racial prejudice and discrimination through these policies. And, as
a reminder, the way they altered it, they removed that, the way they altered it
is by saying it includes now, instead of that, systemic oppression of a racial
group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another.
They’re talking specifically here about
the social systems that they could say creates oppression—socially, economically,
and politically. Political disadvantage, meaning that any kind of system of
lacking equity—equality of outcome—could be defined as racism.
In other words, folks, they’re saying
that anything that’s not socialism is racist. Anything that does not create absolute
equality—equity, equality of outcome—is racist.
They’ve defined racism by removing
the actual definition of the word: racial prejudice or discrimination. They
altered it to make it so that anything other than equality of outcome is
racist. To make it so, again, that anything other than socialism is called
racist.
You might recall that, in my last post, we saw a similar
bait and switch with the term white supremacy. In the minds of most
people, it’s still a fringe group of people who hate anyone not of their race—a
fringe so tiny most of us have never met one. Yet we’re told, with alarm, that
white supremacy is everywhere and affects everything. But the definition being
thrown at us is, “related to a society that historically had a majority of
white-skinned people.” That means liking Shakespeare is white supremacy.
Admiring the teachings of Aristotle and Plato is white supremacy. They’ve
rendered the term meaningless, but throw it around hoping the stigma of the
original definition will stick.
Racism is yet another term that uses the stigma
attached to the tiny subset—in this case people who practice prejudice or discrimination
based on race—and smear a whole group with it: all whites. And since people don’t
want to be thought of with that horrible stigma, they do whatever the
word-wielders say they must do. And that’s getting pretty extreme. After all,
if your whole system is built on something as vile as racism (not on prejudice or discrimination really,
but on a system that may produce unequal outcomes, yet with the stigma of the
former), then you tear the whole system down and replace it.
Marxism was set up to malign the system based on class
hatred. Oddly, that’s a hard sell in America—since we’re based on the
idea that all of us humans are created equal, without a nobility, aristocracy,
or monarchy, and also no bourgeoisie or plebeians. And it couldn’t merely be
about economic class hatred, because economic class mobility is the expectation in
America. So the replacement for class and wealth hatred is race hatred—often extended
lately to other minorities, in a Venn diagram showing where they intersect,
because intersection means more power, but we’ll leave those for another day.
I took a screenshot of the BLM website “What We Believe” page last August,
when everyone was using Black Lives Matter as a way of
saying, “I’m not prejudiced or discriminatory based on race,” when its real intent was the destruction of society and replacement with Marxist tyranny placing them
in the ruling positions. Among the word salad of things that may not mean what
you think they mean was the deadly serious declaration that they intended to do
away with the nuclear family structure—disregarding all the calamities that
happen when the family is damaged—and replace it with a communal structure. On
other pages of their website they openly revealed their Marxist and socialist philosophy
and intentions. It was not about declaring you weren't prejudiced or discriminatory toward blacks, as many protestors thought.
Marxism has always been about tearing down the existing
society and forcing on it a tyranny that they call equitable, but is really
just more power and money for the very few at the top and much less for all the
others. That’s why they don’t flinch when a leader who declares herself a trained Marxist has multi-million-dollar mansions.
The thing about language is, you can’t actually change it
just by including or excluding a word in a dictionary. Language is made up of the
words people use to represent ideas.
But what you can do, if you have ways of pulling the
strings, is use a different definition while you know the person you’re talking
to is using the well-understood definition, and you attach additional baggage to
the word. And eventually, when someone gets confused and goes to the dictionary,
which you’ve manipulated, you say, “See, this is what it meant all along; you
were just mistaken.”
The lie, this time, had to include people in power over the
dictionary—at least a particular dictionary. I don’t know how they managed
that. But if they—whoever they are—can change the language at their
bidding, that should give us pause.
There’s a scripture I think applies. This is from the book
of Jacob, in the Book of Mormon, the first time those ancient people encounter
an anti-Christ:
And he was learned, that he had a perfect knowledge of the language of
the people; wherefore, he could use much flattery, and much power
of speech, according to the power of the devil.—Jacob 7:4
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| the story of Sherem the anti-Christ from Jacob 7 screenshot from this video portrayal |
I’ve often thought about this verse, since words are my minor superpower. I think it’s a good thing to have skill in use of language—for telling the truth. But the enemy of truth, maybe especially in our day, uses power of speech as a weapon.
I’m still thinking through how to fight that weapon. Notice
it. Call it out. Require definitions. Ask sincerely, “Why do you think that?”
But do not concede. Do not give up words and their truthful meanings.
[i] The
link is for EpochTV.com. While a large part of the program is available on
YouTube, this segment was toward the end, saved for the membership site.
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