RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a push by some of the less insane lefties in the US to get the Democrats to talk normally, like the rest of humanity, instead of in their progressive pidgin patois.  According to a liberal (i.e. leftist) think-tank calling itself The Third Way, Democrats “who wish to stop Donald Trump and MAGA” should first stop using “words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying”.So, it’s out with terms like “birthing person” and “LGBTQIA+” and it’s in with words like mother and gay or homosexual.  Out, also, go the lazy, dismissive labels and clichéd epithets which the more highly strung reaches of the Left use for people of differing political opinions, terms such as ‘cookers’, ‘anti-vaxxers’ (of course), the go-to slur of ‘far right’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ (who are often further vilified by the adjective ‘fringe’ and sometimes additionally dirtied by a second adjective making them ‘dangerous fringe conspiracy theorists’).

Calling everyone who marches for curbs to immigration an evil Nazi white-supremacist, which I’m sure we can all agree is a deeply original and compelling political critique the likes of which nobody has heard for at least ten, oh even twenty, seconds, may actually be a little overwrought and not all that conducive to halting the steady stream of sensible Democrats who are deserting their political home.

The words and phrases to be exiled from leftist discourse are classed under six categories:  Therapy-speak, Seminar Room Language, Organizer Jargon, Gender/Orientation Correctness, The Shifting Language of Racial Constructs and Explaining Away Crime.

The following examples give a flavour of just how far the linguistic gangrene has spread in the progressive patient and which The Third Way wishes to excise (my suggestions about what these terms really mean are added in italics):

♦ incarcerated people [criminals]

♦ justice-involved individuals [ditto, for example the repeat offender Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., with at least fourteen prior arrests, who offed the Ukrainian lass on the train was a justice-involved individual].

♦ dialoguing [chat]

♦ triggering [telling a truth]

♦ microaggression [offending a thin-skinned snowflake]

♦ body shaming [funny fat jokes, even if told by funny fat people such as: ‘I’m not fat, I’ve just got a thyroid problem’. ‘Oh, what are you taking for that – pies?’]

♦ subverting norms [behaving like a jerk who mistakes ostentatious virtue-signalling display for substantive political argument]

♦ systemic oppression [an excuse for dispensing with the criteria of merit and individual responsibility]

♦ cultural appropriation [wearing sombreros or plaiting your hair in cornrows).

♦ the unhoused [smelly winos]

♦ housing insecurity [about to become a smelly, homeless person because you bought weed before paying the rent]

♦ food insecurity [coming up short at the end of the month because you wasted your Centrelink money on Netflix and Mars Bars]

♦ birthing person [mother]

♦ pregnant people [pregnant women]

♦ cisgender [I still don’t quite know what this means but I believe it is something to do with heterosexuality, something bad]

♦ heteronormative [no one knows what this means, either]

♦ dead-naming [he’ll always be Bruce Jenner, or Bradley Manning, or Dean Laidley to me, not to mention ‘Robin’ (deadname Robert) Westman, the mentally ill (trans)man who shot up those, now very dead, Catholic kiddies recently in Minneapolis]

♦ BIPOC [Google tells me this acronym stands for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, but having to use Google Translate to decode terms like this doesn’t make for good communication).

♦ The marginalised [see BIPOC. You can tell who the ‘marginalised’ people are by reading a calendar because if they get two weeks or a month all to themselves (Gay Pride, AFL Indigenous Rounds], for example) then they are ‘marginalised’.  By the way, whatever happened to BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) – really, it’s so hard to keep up with the latest woke language fashions].

♦ LGBTQIA+ [the gays and whatever. Dropping LGBTQIA+ form the leftist lexicon would be a tacit admission there are only two sexes and anything else, all 79 varieties of ‘gender’, can be found in the DSM-5-TR (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders].

There are, however, some terms missing from The Third Way’s list, so for a fuller understanding of the progressive’s linguistic nuttiness, we could add the following:

♦ Neurodivergent [compassionate ‘inclusivity’ term for the cognitively askew, behaviourally different and socially awkward. They definitely do not have a medical ‘disorder’ but are fully-fledged members of glorious diversity].

♦ Gender dysphoric [a phase that some kids go through but which some sadists insist must be treated by hideous drugs and radical surgery].

♦ Gender-affirming care [castration]

♦ ‘Undocumented migrant’, ‘irregular migrant’, ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum-seeker’ [code for ‘Illegal immigrant’ or ‘illegal alien’ who sponge off our welfare and take our jobs].

♦ ‘Content moderation [censorship]

♦ ‘Misinformation’ [inconvenient truths, a concept which really came of age during Covid]

♦ ‘Words are violence’ [but only words used by ‘bad’ people but never when used by the Left – a call to ‘decapitate TERFS’, therefore, is not violence at all when used by progressives. For that matter, normal people would never use ‘TERF’ even if they knew what it meant).

The Third Way also ignores the nimble and wide-ranging vocabulary of bumper-sticker slogans that replace actual thinking by progressives, slogans such as Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, ‘Hands Up!  Don’t Shoot’, #MeToo, ‘Diversity is our Strength’, ‘Always Was, Always Will Be’(and anything else from the verbal cornucopia of Aboriginal victimhood and identity politics), and ‘Trans women are women’ (remember when bearded ladies were simply carnival sideshow attractions and not some bloke sharing your daughter’s sports changeroom?). 

Even with the phrases which The Third Way proposes for some spring-cleaning, they offer no substitutes because to even utter such replacement phrases risks normalising them and sullying the speaker with all sorts of ‘unconscious biases’ (that phrase should also be past its Best By Date, which it never actually had).  Language is a key part of the identity politics loyalty test for the modern progressive and if you don’t use the “approved” language, you’re a Nazi. Period.

Don’t get too complacent, however.  The use of political in-group language is an affliction on the right too (my pet bugbear is the derogatory-sounding but obscurely elitist bien pensant).  Nevertheless, the Left, as far as language political-marker code goes, takes the cake, indeed pretty much the whole patisserie of wacky and woke words.

The Third Way’s attempt to restore some linguistic sanity on the US Left looks doomed to fail because any Democrat language reformers are likely to be purged from the party and cast into ideological exile for the sin of wrong-speak.  Nothing terrifies progressives more than plain English so their reality-denying vocabulary looks set to continue because, according to George Orwell’s  Newspeak, the idea is that if you can control the language people use, “chiefly by eliminating undesirable words”, then you can control their very thought processes by making “a heretical thought …. literally unthinkable”.

Until, oh frabjous day, callooh callay, the Left achieves it’s apparent political Death Wish (Thanatos, Freud called it) through verbal self-implosion, it looks like reality-based, plainspoken people will have to put up with more linguistic lunacy from the ‘progressive’ Left.