Words, as we know, no longer mean what they used to. Some have been realigned, some reassigned, and some of the peskier ones have been banished, presumably for good. Some new words have appeared out of nowhere, and some older ones are now almost unrecognisable. “Blessed”, for instance, is now little but a fatuous Instagram cliché, usually accompanying a photograph of a saturated sunset or a particularly expensive meal (over-filtered and carefully cropped). It is meant to express a feeling of satisfaction with one’s lot but is actually an expression of the exact opposite: you don’t see many Instagram posts of the Wembley section of the North Circular at rush hour in the rain, with “Blessed” nestling underneath.
There are many other nonsensical humblebrags that spend their time clogging up social media. “Happy Place”, which is another smug feel-good bromide. “And breathe”, which people appear to use to celebrate the fact they eventually made it home on the bus. Or “abundance”, which is just colloquial shorthand for, well, actually nothing. As for, “So I did a thing…”, might it be possible to say you just went for a manicure?
We’re drawing attention to the fact that it isn’t possible to have alternative opinions
Then there are the words you see on motivational signs outside bars and cafés, which combine quaintness with Christmas cracker wisdom. A lot of this can just be put down to fashion, and the changing lexicon of a rapidly evolving society that delights in dumping the past.
Language moves so quickly these days that it unsurprisingly gets lost up its own fundament. A while ago I was helping a company relaunch their website, which involved a lot of meetings with a bunch of digital natives who were old enough to know better and who had started to drink their own Kool-Aid.
At one of these meetings, I had to bite both my lips when the person in front of me said, without a hint of irony, they were going to “solutionise” a problem. This was a genuine case of someone literally not knowing what they were talking about.
But of course, the real issue of the day is the way in which words have become weaponised. “Tolerance” is now treated with abject suspicion because it can supposedly excuse abhorrent beliefs. While “political correctness” has for some time obviously been a term of abuse. Martin Amis used to say that, at its grandest, political correctness was simply an attempt to accelerate evolution. He said while he was intolerant, he was a lot less intolerant than his parents, while his children would be even less intolerant.
“PC seeks to get things done right now,” he said. In a heartbeat he made a case for political correctness which in my eyes transformed the phrase completely. But usually it’s the other way round, as words have become bullets. In the summer we launched a series of pieces under the Freedom of Speech banner, a collection of articles, columns and interviews with the likes of Suzanne Moore, Hadley Freeman, Lionel Shriver and Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock. We started the series as a way of highlighting just how difficult it is right now to express any kind of opinion that doesn’t conform to the liberal orthodoxy.
We weren’t attempting to present alternative opinions, simply to draw attention to the fact that it isn’t possible to have alternative opinions. The pendulum appears to be stuck, trapped in mid-air like a broken Newton’s Cradle.
We expected to be attacked on social media, although for me the most disappointing comment came from some anonymous buffoon who immediately accused us of being Right-wing, because “free speech” is an illiberal conceit. This is nothing new, of course, as Karl Marx was the first person to convincingly turn the traditional role of liberalism on its head. Having once been viewed as the decisive force against elite power, Marxism determined liberalism had become the fiercest form of elitism. And this is where we are in 2023. Free speech is Right-wing and by all accounts there’s nothing we can do about that.
Apart from launching a series devoted to it, that is. And while we obviously haven’t solutionised the issue, we’ve certainly helped continue the debate.
