Say what you mean

What do you do when the words you've used all your life are no longer usable? Not that they're worn out, no, just that they don't mean what they used to. Some came along and changed them. Is that even possible? Well, truth be told it is.

It's not a new thing, really. Not two hundred years ago if you used the word "awful" it was a good thing. What you were experiencing, looking at, feeling, filled you with awe. Not Rumsfeldian awe, real awe ... wonder, admiration, the kinds of feelings many folks used to have toward G-d, when there was allowed to be One. Some "awesome" only had some awe, and not necessarily good awe ... pre-Rumsfeld, but more that kind of awe. In other words, it was a relatively negative term. Today though, they've switched places.

This is, I suppose, a natural process of language, but I missed the awful/awesome switch, and I can't say I'm sorry. But the one we're seeing now is a little more troubling to me.

I'm talking about very basic political orienting terms like "conservative" and "liberal". Growing up, I always thought that conservatives were people who wanted to conserve, keep, protect, hold on to something. And for the most part, that's what it looked like they were doing, even if I didn't particularly agree with them. On the other hand, the root of the word "liberal" is the Latin word for freedom, that is, liberals were the ones advocating change, more often than not in the sense of more individual and collective freedoms, even it I didn't agree with where they were going with some things. That's all changed now.

We may talk about neo-liberal economics, but the "neo-" prefix is a matrixian sleight-of-hand to make you think it's about the free flows of money or something. It's not, it's about restricting those flows to some unspecified club of folks who think that agreeing on bonus contracts is a more valuable skill than actually protecting people's savings. Of course, our friends at Faux News like to use it as an epithet to simply discredit anyone they don't want having any say. This is perhaps the most heinous usage, but it does seem to be the one that is catching on, so we have all of this "ilk" being tossed into the same pot for regular stirring.

On the other hand, I had to sit up and take notice when I read a recent article by the linguist George Lakoff, who rather poignantly pointed out that the upswell in alleged conservatism in the United States is anything but that. Instead, they are actually redefining and recasting a number of notions that I once thought I knew what they meant, like privacy, democracy, values, and basic human rights. Just when I thought I was beginning to understand the world and what people were saying, I find out -- once again -- I don't. Oh well, back to the dictionary, I guess.

Like I said, shifts in meaning are a natural part of language, and I actually believe that the awful/awesome switch was the result of a natural process. What is happening now, however, is quite a different story. I guess I have to be on my toes to find out what some people really mean. I wish they would just say what they mean ... and mean what they say. But maybe I'm not supposed to know.