Massacre words and massacring words

There’s a trope that’s out there online that goes something like this: the Left, in all of its powerlessness, has resorted to focusing on the meaning of words to express most of our activism. We can influence other people’s words and so we try to. Effective activism requires the right words and saying the wrong thing is bad.

We defend words; the meanings that pop up when you google define:iconoclast define:countenance or whatever. We appeal to people to Use The Right Words.

When there isn’t a good enough word to express what we’re saying, we sometimes invent new words. But mostly, we defend the meaning of words the way that we defend the meaning of fact — this means that and not this and let’s be very clear about these things.

Sometimes, we get collectively angry when words are misused. Whether careless or intentional, some misuses are irritating but some misuses are clear-cut capital sins. Calling someone who absolutely is not a groomer, a “groomer,” for example.

I don’t think that the trope that we focus on words because we have lost our power is wholly correct: there are a good many of just and righteous battles that we need to wage over the meaning of words. Especially since if we relent the meaning of certain words, we may lose them forever.

But the trope is not wholly wrong either. It’s much easier to get mad about someone’s imprecise use of words online than it is to do pretty much anything in real life that builds power. With building power not going super well these days, yes, some of the fights over words and their meanings is a proxy for our lack of power.

Regardless of the reasons for why we choose to wage war over words, the online Left has walked itself into a corner that I’m not sure we’re collectively aware enough of to get out.

It isn’t entirely our fault. There’s a natural desire for people who seek justice to appeal to reason and rationality. The basis of both is words: their meaning and using them correctly. And then, there’s the bad actors. Even if just 20% of aggressive and frivolous word policing is being done by people seeking to destablize leftwing movements, that’s significant. Lobbing chaos bombs into leftwing spaces online would be the absolute funnest job for a cop or a narc. We have no idea who is acting in bad faith and it’s so easy to destabilize leftwing conversation online because we have no common or collective material basis from which to build our online relationships. We *think* we know who we’re talking to but do we *really* ?

Liberals are adept at using words. They don’t strive to use words correctly; their main goal is to use words as cynically as possible. They know that this drives the word purists nuts.

We then find ourselves fighting Liberals over torquing words and everyone to the right of them of abusing words. These fights are coded as 2023’s version of left wing struggle. We’re the side that cares about facts and dictionary definitions, spelling, grammar and syntax, right?

None of this would be a problem if our biggest enemy cared about what words meant. If we were fighting people who used words properly, accurately and in good faith, then our collective orientation to defending words would give us an advantage. But here we are: up against a movement who says that all these people are actually the opposite of what they are, or that up is down or that stop means gun it or that fluff is lead and lead is a cotton ball and a cotton ball can be consumed for breakfast. But also, that breakfast is a lie and so too is lunch, unless you eat a steak with both to show to the world in no uncertain terms that you are not gay (even though you do gay things from time to time but privately and also do not call them gay).

None of it makes any sense and it’s enough to make you feel crazy.

I think we need to rebalance the scales and understand that words both matter and don’t at all matter. That for every true meaning of a word there may be a million legitimate false ones and ten million illigitimate false ones.

The real issue isn’t that we focus on words. It’s that we’ve lost common spaces from which we can build collective defenses or uses of words themselves. We leave that to pop culture which means that popular expressions are created first and foremost, in the service of profit. The internet fractures us, keeps us living in our own heads; words that were once collectively imagined, collectively conceived and togetherly shared are all in our heads now. We type words more than we say words and we hear words from strangers more than words from our own, real life relations.

No wonder these things are so fragile. No wonder we cling to these things as if to lose their true definitions, we will lose our language, our sense of ourself and the world and order itself.

But we have to learn to see the sense in those butchered words; that sometimes it isn’t the word or actually, it’s never the word. It’s the meaning behind it, even if the meaning is the opposite of that word. And learn why using words like this can be effective — maybe loosen our own grips on defending the meaning of words just a bit?

I don’t think that we fight untethered and crazymaking rhetoric with a leftwing version of the same thing. I think there are other ways. But I do think that our focus on words and their proper meaning has led us astray — we risk falling out of common parlance if we are principly preoccupied that others use words correctly.

So maybe, I dunno, as an act of resistence, mutilate your favourite words and see what you can build with the pieces that you find scattered on the floor.

“In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.”

• Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce