What can I say?

It struck me recently that not only are attention spans diminishing at a frightening rate, and not only are sound-bites getting shorter, they're also becoming emptier. When is the last time you heard a clipped quip on the news that really made any sense? I'm guessing it's been a while, because I'm having trouble finding people who say anything anymore. You would think in a situation like this one, words would become all the more important, but it seems to me that they are being emptied faster than the phrases that are supposed to give them meaning.

How about "free market"? There's one that gets bandied about a lot. My question is, though, just how free is a market if a non-market player steps in and hands over almost a trillion dollars to keep it alive? I'm not sure I understand either part of that phrase in that context? Or, how about "liberal"? I like that one too. It derives from the Latin liber, meaning free, but it is used at least in America these days as an epithet for socialist dictatorship, which is about as "unfree" as you can get. How does that happen? Or, what about that other favorite epithet of my youth, the really bad tag to hang on someone, "communist"? We don't use that at all any more as a term of derision. Why is that? Oh, right, because the only remaining communists in the world, the Chinese, our preferred trade partner, have outed themselves as the biggest capitalists of all.

I think I'm onto the problem, though. We don't use many words as words anymore. We prefer labels. Label someone as something, and you don't have to talk to them, you don't have to discuss anything with them, you can simply ignore them, because who would wanted to be associated with "those types"? This has long been a ploy in politics, but it has begun to permeate every aspect of our lives. We find the technique employed in the media, in schools, most definitely in sports, but at home as well.

I'm not the first to notice this, believe me. These are what Pörksen calls "plastic words", they are "argument killers": throw these words in to a discussion or debate and it grinds to a screeching halt. There's no way to counter them: they are so embedded in our personal ideologies that no criticism will be tolerated. But that's the problem: they are the means of argumentation of intolerance. It would do us well to start thinking about words and then start using them as they were intended: as a way of communication.