When I was young, my dad would
sometimes criticize me for engaging in “word games.” Perhaps I was already parsing words; my parents and maternal grandfather were all lawyers. My last name is Worden, after all. I was
raised to pronounce the name, war-den,
and only after decades did it occur to me that people might spell the name as Worden rather than Warden if I pronounced it as word-n.
I was the first even in the extended family to use the alternative; as Nietzsche wrote, no philosopher is a man of his time. We tend to think
outside the proverbial constrained “box” because we critique assumptions and
arguments (i.e., critical thinking), including those of the “boxes” that
society leaves unquestionably standing as part of the status quo—the tyranny of
which has repelled philosophers wetted to the idea that no stone should be left
unturned, even if a society deems some
stones as sacrosanct. It can be dangerous even to question the solidity of
those stones, especially if they formed out of ideological controversies
wherein tussling instinctual urges contesting for societal dominance. In this
too, I am drawing on Nietzsche, who even viewed the content of ideas as being
instinctual urges. In being willing to subject societally cherished ideas to
fundamentally unique and deep scrutiny, Friedrich Nietzsche is the last, at
least as of my time living in an American desert, both academically and
geographically, where plenty of Nietzsche’s “herd animals” freely roamed. They
were particularly vulnerable to ideological word-games in unquestioningly
accepting the words from the insurgent ideologies as valid.
For example, the mindless
expression used by retail employees, “Have a good one!” had become ubiquitous
by 2020 in America even though no antecedent is mentioned for the pronoun, one.
“Have a good what?” I would sometimes answer. The response would be even worse,
such as “Whatever you want!” so I vanquished that experiment with truth. Why
had “Have a good day!” or “Thanks for shopping here” succumbed to a vacuous “one”?
To be sure, the grammatical error was more of an indication that business
schools, like law and medical schools, should accept students for their
respective first degrees after those students have earned a first degree in
another school, such as that of the liberal arts and sciences, so the basics
are not truncated. Certainly no passive aggression is involved in the
ungrammatical expression.
Such aggression, I submit,
underlies some cases of word games wherein ideological advocates insist that
their respective instinctual urges, which include dominance, be accepted by
adopting a questionable word-change even though it renders comparisons highly
(yet invisibly!) unfair. Not by accident, the linguistic “game board” is
tilted. People who do not play along with the change, perhaps because they can
sniff the obvious yet hushed ideological game, can unfairly be subject to
presumptuous pressure to use the new word appropriately.
In short, the assertion, “That word [or comparison] is [now] inappropriate” can
be used as a weapon.
For example, by 2020 the words
male and female had come to be regularly extended from animals to human beings.
So whereas formerly a person might ask, “Is your dog a female?” it had become proper to ask, for example, “Was the
driver a female?” The same applied to
the word, male. Initially, I would answer such a derogatory question with, “You
mean was the driver a woman?” In answering my question affirmatively, the
person, whether a man or woman, would tacitly acknowledge that the use of the
word female was based on a conformist ideology. Feminists could have used
implicit comparisons, such as in the statement, “Was the driver a male or a
woman?” and anti-feminists could have resorted to, “Was the driver a man or a
female?” I had not heard such comparisons being made, but just in reading the
two questions I can detect passive aggression. Indeed, that would likely be the
purpose behind the respective wordings.
Racial hatred could also manifest
through comparisons. On February 12, 2020, President Lincoln’s birthday
ironically, a political reporter on National Public Radio discussing the
previous day’s 2020 New Hampshire presidential primary said that the state is “mostly
white so African Americans had not yet had the chance to be heard.” Then the
reporter referred to Iowa and New Hampshire as “lily white.” This expression
points to a racial bias, at least in regard to areas in which mostly Caucasians
live. In using the actual name of the race, Caucasian, I am trying to correct
for the convenient category mistake in the reporter’s comparison of whites with
African Americans.” The latter term is an ethnic rather than a racial term. A Caucasian
man from South Africa who has moved to American is an African American. That
this term was invented by Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist, is a hint as
to the ideological impetus behind the ideologically-driven intension behind the
switch from “Black,” a racial term, to “African American,” an ethnic immigrant
term. The force of the ideology is responsible for the category mistake. On two
occasions, I made statements in which the axis of comparison is skewed in the
other direction. One interesting example is, “Caucasians and Blacks can get
along.” Even in spite of the friendly idea, my acquaintance scolded me. “Don’t
use Caucasian.” Yet if I had used “whites” instead, as in “Whites and Blacks
can get along”—a statement that Martin Luther King likely said many times—a
Caucasian with a certain ideological bias would likely have corrected me, insisting that I use “African American” rather than “Black” even
though the former is not a term that refers to a race! Passive aggression
fueled by an insurgent ideology can all too willingly rip through reasoning.
Nietzsche would say that such reasoning is itself a tussle of instinctual
urges, the most dominant in this case being one that clashes with the urge
behind the ideology.
I submit that many people take words and
linguistic comparisons at face level only. The real uses, at the ideological
(and even instinctual urge) level, are frequently overlooked. The operative
assumption is that in the selection of words, even in comparison to others,
speakers and writers are ideologically neutral. The encroaching natural
tendency of an ideology (and the instinctual urges behind it) is not recognized
in its fullness. I submit that both the overlooking and the selection can be
done unconsciously, though conscious intent in the selection can also exist.
The person who feels a little uncomfortable but cannot identify why after hearing,
“Was the driver a man or a female?” or “Was the driver Caucasian or Black?”---or
even worse, “Was the driver a Caucasian woman or a Black male?”—unconsciously senses
the ideological bias, especially if the listener’s ideology, and thus dominant
urges, are at odds with the bias. The listener who knows that the comparisons
are insulting or otherwise diminutive to one gender or one race also knows that
passive aggression was involved. Sadly, the human “race” can be too creative
and subtle in turning something into a weapon. At the very least, making
specific instances of linguistic weapons transparent to other people can be
done such that those instances may lose their fangs in the antiseptic of
sunlight.
