The Language Hijackers
How activists change our language in an attempt to commandeer popular society.
Ideas are the rudder of societies. Great ideas are responsible for great businesses, inventions that changed history, and the establishment of new civilizations.
Ideas are also responsible for stuff like slavery, authoritarian governments, the second world war, and new country music.
Buddha, that plump patron of personal improvement said:
“Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.”
Guess what? These ideas that birthed new civilizations and started world wars were first given life simply by speaking them into existence. Even the very first page of the Bible is nothing but God saying a bunch of stuff and then those things magically appearing.
Words are powerful containers for ideas, and language is how we organize those words for communicating and understanding these ideas.
Throughout human history, men have looked for ways to get their ideas heard and also for ways to stifle other men's (and women's) ideas. This has been achieved by everything from literal soap boxes in the city square, to whispered slogans in back alleys, to sophisticated propaganda campaigns. These days a common way to spread ideas is with the use of social media and blogs like the one you're reading right now. By the way, if you'd like ideas like this delivered straight to your inbox (for FREE!), you can sign up right here.👇
See what I did there?😉
A relatively recent development in the realm of idea spreading and propaganda (aside from the internet) is something called “linguistic hijacking”, which is “the phenomenon wherein politically significant terminology is co-opted by dominant groups in ways that further their dominance over marginalized groups.”1
The funny thing about linguistic hijacking is that somehow this form of propaganda and control, rather than targeting marginalized groups, is now being levied against the dominant majority by a very vocal minority. Okay, that's not actually the funny part. The funny part is that this vocal minority seems to genuinely believe that they are in fact the majority and they really can't fathom that anyone would even think of disagreeing with anything they come up with, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. I believe the word that best describes this particular phenomenon is “narcissism”, but that's another story.
The other funny thing about linguistic hijacking is that I had already noticed it on my own a little while ago and called it “language hijacking”. It was, in fact the reason I began writing this in the first place. Imagine my chagrin when in the process of writing this piece, I discovered that a professor at Boston University had already written a peer reviewed paper on it two years prior with a much fancier sounding name.
For the purposes of this article, and because this hijacking is now targeting the establishment instead of the other way around (and also because I'd still like to lay some claim to this idea), I'm going to stick with “language hijacking” even if it doesn't sound nearly as hip and cool.
Language hijacking happens slowly, a little at a time. I wrote about this a while ago in The Woke's War on Words.
Since language is the way we express ideas, and ideas are what largely shape our society, a deceptively easy way to change the ideas (and thus the direction of society) is to change the language.
The idea behind this is related to a similar thing called “linguistic relativity”, which refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality.
In about the middle of last century there was a study designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently. These guys basically concluded that if your primary language includes more words to describe specific colours, you will remember and recognize those colours better than if your language has fewer names for colours.2
This shows how important it is to give something a name, and even more importantly, to create an association with that name.
Now think about the way we perceive something like racism today compared with 20 years ago. Obviously most (not all) of what was considered racist 20 years ago is still considered racist today, but much of what's considered racist today, would never have been thought of as racist 20 years ago.
The reason I say not everything that was considered racist 20 years ago is still considered racist today is because many of the current laws on the books now (specifically affirmative action type laws) would certainly have been considered racist in the past if your definition of racism is, “treating people differently based on their race”. Now, according to these laws, it's not only considered not racist, but it's actually seen as a solution to racism.
So treating people differently based on their race may not always be considered racist anymore, but there are apparently many more new ways to be racist. Presumably this is because just being a regular racist in the old way is passé. For example, wearing hoop earrings can now be considered racist by some who consider themselves Latinx. By the way, many of these Latinx people also consider the term “Latino” to be offensive, so…
Also, tweeting Beyoncé song lyrics is considered racist now as NDP M.P. Niki Ashton found out during a 2017 campaign. Obviously this is according to the Vancouver chapter of Black Lives Matter. Because, cultural appropriation, don’tcha know. As expected, she immediately removed the offending tweet and offered a humble apology, even though four of the five people who wrote the quoted song are white.
I've noticed the word “lived” showing up quite a lot lately. As in, “lived experience”. I've already mentioned how stupid I think that phrase is (you can read about it here if you want to as well as about flexitarians and transhanders).
Just this week as I was writing this, I was introduced to (sorry, that's not quite the right word. More like my intelligence was assaulted by) the phrase, “lived gender”. This is a perfect example of how these terms are hijacked to represent a specific ideal. I mean, one can hardly argue with experience. Or with gender, for that matter. We all have experience and we all have gender. Yes, I realize that in some circles the jury is still out on the gender thing, but the point is that for those of us that do have a gender and experience to go with it, it is apparently not nearly as valid or applicable (we are told) as someone with lived experience and lived gender.
Being someone who resides in what is arguably one of the coldest populated places on earth, I now wonder if what I experience here during an average winter could be considered “lived” weather…
But I digress.
I used to wonder if the people presenting these new words and phrases really believe we're dimwitted enough to just accept them at face value. I don't wonder that anymore because they obviously do expect that and evidently we are. At least, the collective “we” are. And those in charge are, and that's all that really matters.
Carl Jung said, “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” I think that's accurate, and in the case of language hijacking, these ideas are barely ideas at all, but really just overgrown toddlers whining for recognition and more stuff. The thought that most of these people could come up with any sort of intelligent, original ideas is laughable based on how they attempt to explain themselves.
The following is from Healthline.com and goes right to the heart of the matter, as it's basically a practical application of that study I mentioned earlier:
Having language that helps demonstrate the many ways people experience, express, or identify their gender allows us all to more clearly see and understand the entire gender spectrum — including and beyond the traditional binary gender categories of man and woman.
What follows the quote is a brief explanation of 68 (yes, sixty-eight) different genders. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you read them all.
I'll confess I don't know much about Healthline, other than that it appears to be relatively trustworthy, as far as these types of websites go, and of course they assure us that their “healthcare professionals help ensure that the information [they] publish is accurate, evidence-based, current, person-centric, and trustworthy.” Alrighty then, who am I to argue with the experts…?
Instead of answering that last question here, I'll just attempt to expose yet another myth that we're expected to believe, specifically that we're not really even able to answer a question like this if we're not “experts” or “professionals”. As if common sense or a lifetime of experience that doesn't qualify as “lived experience” isn't good enough to spot bullshit when it's literally staring you in the face.
Yes, the “experts” are indeed in control, and if you haven't noticed by now, it doesn't take much to become an expert when you're the one writing the script.
In conclusion, I'd like to offer a few words of encouragement to those of you who (like me) think that common sense is a terribly underated resource.
Trust yourself. If something seems “off” for whatever reason, that's probably because it is. You don't need to be an expert to discern bullshit, and just because someone calls themselves an expert doesn't mean they are one.
This kind of intuition is responsible for keeping humans alive throughout history and those that didn't have it, didn't survive long enough to contribute to the gene pool. It's not always paranoia. And it's not always ignorance. It's one of the most basic survival skills our species has developed and to abdicate that to self-proclaimed experts with questionable credentials and selfish agendas is a sure way to remove ourselves from that gene pool.
Linguistic Hijacking - Derek Anderson, Boston University
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - J.A. Lucy, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001
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Now that was refreshing. And I will say no more except to mention that I recently went back and forth with someone who insisted that not voting or not voting for the proper party was racist, and therefore deserved to be called out as such. And when I properly pointed out that that's not what the word means at all, he went on to explain that it's not racist in the usual and defined sense of the word, but racist nevertheless. Which defeats the whole purpose of having words with meanings.
Ken, out of sincere concern for your mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing, I urge you to take a break from social media. The things you’re often describing, things which seem to cause genuine anguish and even despair, simply don’t exist once you shut the laptop or put down the device.
Nobody cares about ‘appropriation’ or 57 genders. The people who pretend to care deeply about it are just as annoying as the people who get upset at the people who pretend to care about it. There’s a multibillion dollar industry that relies on keeping everyone as outraged and upset as possible, and there are political movements which benefit from that outrage too, but the outrage itself just isn’t worth spending precious time and energy on.
I myself stopped using Facebook in November of 2016 and have never looked back.