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As familiar words are redefined for political ends, navigating today’s cultural debates requires discernment, historical memory, and a refusal to surrender truth to fashionable language. Beware the semantic quicksand!

“Be careful, little mouth, what you say.”

While this pithy little line originally formed part of a children’s song, it strikes me as increasingly wise counsel for adults navigating a dictionary full of fast-changing meanings.

To be sure, the meaning of words has always been changing. Awful no longer means something deserving of awe or admiration. Neither does naughty suggest the idea of being needy, of having naught or nothing. Another, better-known, example is, of course, the word gay.

But when I speak of semantic quicksand, I don’t mean the naturally changing meaning of words. I mean the artificially changing meaning of words.

Though this phenomenon long predates my time, I was first alerted to it in connection with the word tolerance.

I could have sworn the word tolerance meant being willing to endure opinions, beliefs or behaviours I didn’t particularly like. But then it dawned on me that people with power were using the word tolerance to demand my enthusiastic celebration of things I did not approve of.

I’m sure you have your own story to illustrate how the lights came on for you.

Now I see this trend everywhere. Sometimes I feel like Inigo Montoya from the cult classic The Princess Bride when he got wound up by Vizzini’s constant misuse of the word inconceivable.

When Speech is Violence and Violence is Speech

Let me share with you some of the more notorious examples out there.

Genocide. Merriam-Webster defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”

I don’t claim exhaustive knowledge about the Israel-Hamas War, nor can I defend every action taken by the Israelis. But a military that is at pains to minimise civilian casualties while targeting an enemy that admits to using its own civilians as human shields can hardly be accused of genocide.

Claims of a transgender genocide likewise play fast and loose with the facts. Putting fuel on these claims, the Biden administration mourned 26 killed transgender Americans in 2023. Certainly, loss of human life is tragic, but it’s worth noting that the Biden administration ignored the fact that transgender Americans are statistically five times safer than Americans in general.

The US State Department has recognised eight genocides since the Holocaust. How do events in Gaza or in LGBT circles compare to these? What are we saying to victims of the Holocaust or the Holodomor when we co-opt the word genocide for short-term political gain?

Violence. In recent years, it has become fashionable to characterise certain types of speech as violence. If words inflict psychological damage, so the argument goes, their impact is as devastating as physical violence.

But I have noticed that this argument is a one-way street. The same people making such a claim address their ideological opponents with similarly “violent” speech, and do so with impunity. In fact, as we saw during the 2020 BLM and Antifa riots, the same characters defended actual violence — and they defended it as speech.

In certain quarters, the double standards run so deep that, as some have quipped, right-wing speech is violence, while left-wing violence is speech!

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