Ideological Word Games: The Modern Weapon of Choice?

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. 

So You Want to Become an Excellent Writer

A good writer writes well. This truism maintains that a good writer is has mastered the craft of writing. Unfortunately, this feat does not come without considerable effort, for takes some good old-fashioned study in grammar and spelling. Unfortunately, the linguistic mechanics furnish only the means of entry, though this point seems to be lost on the American English teachers who slighted grammar pedagogically in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the novelists who have felt immune from being grammatical for the sake of style have been the interlarded culprits behind the trend of grammar be viewed as relative or an elective. To be sure, style has right of exception, but the problem is when the exceptions become the norm and even an excuse for bad grammar. This is all just foundational stuff; the quality distinguishing the excellent writer from even a good one is passion-fueled insight. The writer who writes out of a strong urge, or instinct, to express an insight publicly naturally finds his or her own voice, and thus identity, as a writer.  In this sense, a writer is like an entrepreneur whose passion breaks through the confines of an organizational structure like lava pushes through the tough shell of a lava dome.

As an entrepreneur, Richard Branson founded the Virgin Group, which went on to include more than 300 companies in the second quarter of 2011. Ordinarily, the reality of running a cumbersome corporation saps entrepreneurial talent, which enables managerial creatures to swoop in and take the reins of power from the founder. In the case of Branson, however, having a large company did not prevent him from taking on new commercial ventures that reflected his dreams in a way that solidified rather than weakened his control. "I'm just ridiculously lucky," he said, "and [I] just love to live my dreams." True to form, he pioneered Virgin Galactic into space and Virgin Oceanic into the deep sea, utilizing the wealth of a large corporation to do so. 

The key to Branson’s business success was his strong passion for exploration. "The interesting thing about exploration is . . . you never quite know what you're going to discover," he said. A discovery is often a significant find, even one that is of a hitherto unknown paradigm. For example, commercial flights into orbit or even the moon would change the meaning of flights. The uncertainty alone of such a paradigm-changer could easily be choked by organizational managers reflecting the caution that has been innate in most corporate cultures. 
Similarly, editors at publishing houses can act as conservative hedges against a novel idea reaching an audience and hopefully society itself. Like Branson, an excellent writer merges the strong motive of a passion with something new enough to matter. Accordingly, Branson’s advice on choosing a profession has bearing on writers: "don't try to start a business because you think you can make money. Start a business because you really want to."
Similarly, the excellent writer utilizes the mechanics of writing to express an underlying passion rather than merely to write for its own sake or to make money. Such a writer is likely to deliver a unique and interesting perspective that is a real contribution because passion tends to go further in the sense of uncovering. Passion-fueled insight can be revolutionary, and thus be a provocation to the interests vested in the status quo. 
In terms of writing, revolutionary ideas such as those of the European philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century can simply be ignored until long after the writer’s death. No philosopher is a man of his times, Nietzsche wrote. No paradigm-wrestling philosopher that is; plenty of pedestrian philosophers fit perfectly well in the society of their day. Such philosophers tend to study minutia and fit in cubby-holes at universities. To question the assumptions of the operating paradigm of the day and even present alternatives is the mission of a learned philosopher whose learning has enabled him or her to escape the usual orbits. Unitary explorers who have a passion for their respective unique ideas, which are of tremendous value, are not only those philosophers, but great writers more generally who have something very significant to present to the world.