Categories
General

Revealing Language

We Americans think and talk big.

It is not unusual to see the word “myriad” used as an adjective, as in “today we have myriad ways to address climate change.”  During the final decade of my university teaching career, I also encountered the word “plethora” in many (but not a myriad of) student essays.

As a noun, myriad technically refers to the product of ten and one thousand or ten thousand. In its most common appearance as an adjective, however, it means “too numerous to be counted.”  The noun “plethora” can refer, according to my dictionary, to “a disease caused by an excess of blood cells.” The adjective, again it most common use in popular writing, is defined as “extreme excess” or “a state of being full.”

What does it say that these words are now being used in our everyday writing to describe something like unlimited expansion?  Does that say something about our current culture? 

Despite or perhaps because of the limitations we have/are experiencing in Coronaville, and in a nation whose legislators in Congress are either unable or unwilling to pass laws, we love to describe things as expansive, or unlimited.  Bigger is better, from our economic system—unregulated capitalism that relies on continuous growth—to our expectations of the future and our recent fascination with trips to Mars.

Even when we back away from words like plethora and myriad, we like to call things “mega,” “grand,” or “humongous”—all words that suggest large or unlimited size.

Why are we using such words of excess now, when simpler words like “more” or “many” or even “much more” served as adequate expressions of largeness for so many decades in the past history of the United States?

Susan, my friend the linguist, assures me that language is always in a state of change—and that this is normal, not a sign of degeneration as some of my grade school teachers thought.  I remember being told by one teacher: “They are children, not kids! Kids are baby goats!”

Yet I cannot help but wonder if changes in language do, at least partly, reflect a hardening or loss of respect in our culture.  Why, for example, has the “F-bomb” become so common in recent years?  And what about even simple acknowledgements like “thank you.”

 Some years ago, I came close to embarrassing members of my family when it first became common for servers in restaurants to say “no problem” instead of “thank you”, “don’t mention it”, or even “sure.”  I almost told a young server: “If I thought I would be a problem, I would not have come into your restaurant.”  I thought it but didn’t say it.

Political language has been part of this linguistic downturn.  Newt Gingrich, Republican majority leader during the Clinton presidency, instructed members of his caucus to think of Democrats as “enemies” rather than “opponents,” a term in long use in Congress. This contributed to the growing political polarization that we now see in Washington, D.C.

Changes in language like that do have an effect.  Words do matter. They can help us feel good or bad about ourselves and about others with whom we differ.  They can bring us together or spread us further apart.

 When progressives use phrases like “defund the police,” they reduce the chances that their opponents will be willing to work with them to change policing by turning some current police responsibilities over to social workers and others who are better equipped to handle them.  

Similarly, when conservatives continue to refer to all of the 2020 protesters as terrorists instead of distinguishing peaceful protest from those who engage in violence, they make it more difficult to deal with the real threat of domestic terrorism, which the FBI tells us is largely found on the right wing of the political spectrum.   

We use language which distorts the truth because we think it will “energize our base,” another use of language to normalize polarization when we should be deploring it and seeking to end it.         

Democracy can thrive only if we replace polemics with problem-solving.

But we would first have to want to solve our problems rather than using them to get re-elected.

Categories
Politics

Untethered From Reality

This is what a political analysist wrote recently when a speaker at a recent meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) claimed that Trump had won the 2020 election.

The words in this title were used by a political analyst to describe a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAP) stating that Trump won the 2020 election.

What does it mean to say that someone is “untethered from reality?”  Psychologists call such people delusional, especially if they really think that what they are saying is true. The rest of us just say they that they are confused, mistaken, or just lying to protect themselves or to convince others of something that is not supported with evidence.  

Of course, children often engage in such defensive behavior. I knew a child once who, when unable to find his belt, claimed that someone had broken into the house during the night and stolen it (later found “hidden” under his bed).

We expect more of educated adults. Perhaps we should not.

What we should understand is that being “untethered from reality” is nothing new in human history, especially political history. It occurred when leaders in ancient Athens overestimated their power in 431 BCE and went to war with Sparta, leaving all of Greece open to conquest by Alexander the Great in the following century.  

It happened again when leaders in Europe in 1914 expected a short war and ended up permanently weakening Europe’s power in the world by the end of World War I in 1918.  And when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and declared war on the United States that same year, he was “untethered” from the reality of what these two “flanking powers” would do to his “thousand-year Reich” by 1945.

Even in our daily lives, we often cling to delusions we deem necessary to our emotional survival. Especially in difficult times, we are programed, it seems, to divide into camps, with ourselves among the good people and the “others” responsible for all the real or imagined evils that beset us.

Then there is also our ego-driven desire for power, governed far more by our emotions far than by our ability to reason.  It is just the way we are as humans, like it or not.

Do we think that saying that someone is “untethered from reality” will shock that person or his or her followers into repentance and a return to reason?   Do we think it will matter to those we see as delusional?  Naw, not really!  

Usually, I dare say, we are just trying to rally our base, those already persuaded, as well as to convince the imaginary “undecideds,” and get out the vote. What we often accomplish is just a continuation of the current political polarization.  

We face a dilemma?  Those of us who prefer legislation to help our fellow citizens over the current demoralizing “tug of war” in Congress now realize that belief in bi-partisanship is becoming an idea almost as untethered from reality as the belief that Trump won the 2020 election.  

Are we Democrats caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, to use another cliché?   The lack of ability to pass significant legislation itself weakens our faith in democracy at the very time the Republican Party is working to suppress voting at the state level.  

Are we approaching another civil war, this one over whether or not to remain a democratic republic or to move to minority rule by a dictator subservient to the rich (what Greeks called oligarchy, government by the few)?

The only way out, it seems, is to use the courts to preserve our right to vote while trying to convince voters that democracy is worth saving—and that can be done only if we clearly see the alternative. Twentieth-century authoritarian leaders were responsible for many millions of deaths.

Unfortunately, dictatorship is again part of our world’s political reality.  After all, dictators get things done quickly and do not tolerate political divisions.  They cut down rainforests in Brazil, fight Covid with soldiers in China, financially enrich those who support them in Russia, and ignore the poor everywhere.

Surely that will never happen here?  We are “proud to be Americans, because at least we know we’re free,” Lee Greenwood told us many years ago.

Let us hope and act as if that is still true. The clock is ticking.