The Perversion of Language

Once upon a time, the political spectrum looked something like this:

It was sometimes argued that that line would be better represented as a circle. That made sense in many ways. There is very little practical difference between a communist and a fascist — both are defined by their zest for telling others how to live and a prioritisation of dogma over evidence. The far-left and far-right may be driven by disparate tenets but they have an alarmingly similar record when it comes to death, destruction and general misery.

Thankfully, the bulk of people found themselves somewhere in the middle of the chart. We might have disagreed on all manner of things but for those of us in that broad centre ground there was a consensus that extremists were there to be despised and ridiculed. Memories of World War II were fresh in the mind and the disastrous results of the ideological zeal of Stalin and Hitler coloured our thoughts.

Needless to say, the extremists weren’t too happy with this post-war, democratic model. They were tired of being laughed at and sought their revenge on the free world.

The left struck first with Cultural Marxism — an attempt to shepherd thought towards the extreme left by imposing linguistic strait-jackets on political discourse.

Cultural Marxism certainly piggy-backed the trend for political correctness but the two should not be confused. PC, in many ways, was simply a sharpening up of good, old fashioned manners. Few would dispute that it is monumentally ill-informed and impolite to call someone in a wheelchair a “spastic”.

Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, took PC way beyond simple decency. It sought to manipulate our very language into a tool for the advancement of a political agenda. Inevitably, there was something of a backlash and it wasn’t too long before “It’s political correctness gone mad!” became a ubiquitous phrase. In nearly all cases, of course, it was Cultural Marxism that had gone mad, but that didn’t matter. The phrase had a ring to it.

People soon became sick and tired of being told that man-holes should be renamed because they were emblematic of oppressive male hegemony. They just wanted the damned road fixed. The loony-right now had a very large stick with which to beat the loony-left and they swung it with gusto.

The PC backlash, however, wasn’t quite enough to sell some of the more outlandish ideas of the new-right, so along came the alt-right. At first, they simply did what came naturally to them, spitting bile and spreading discord but they soon discovered that this had about as much appeal to the middle-ground as the insane wittering of the communists.

There was no point attacking the extreme left. Nobody took them seriously anyway. It was far more effective to attack the centre ground by accusing it of communism and what better way to do that than by an out and out assault on the stubborn centre?

A new tool was needed and the reds had shown them the way. The extreme right realised that to win, they needed to shift the centre line to some point well within their own half of the pitch. In order to do this, they would simply reinvent reality.

And so, it was that the alt-right set about an epic campaign of linguistic perversion. The definition of liberal was changed from “open-minded and tolerant” to “screaming lefty”. Mainstream went from meaning “normal” to indicating a “communist conspiracy”.

And on and on it goes. Left- and right-wing fanatics taking it in turns to make the world a more miserable place and destroying our beautiful language along the way. The pendulum swings wider each time while the rest of us look on in disbelief.

It would be wonderful if extremists of all stripes would simply leave the running of the world to those without an agenda, but that is clearly too much to ask.

I would, though, like to set a little challenge for ideologues everywhere: Can you express your views without the use of slogans, borrowed words or any deliberately distorted definitions? Try it. It might be a little harder than you thought. If you have to remodel a language to match your opinion, it might not be the language that’s broken.