Ol' Wristy is getting better. Again. Still in a brace, but we're going swimming in six days, whether it likes it or not.
In the meantime, dear god, is this week's On The Media ("Normalize This!") ever relevant. Because I write things for my day job, and because I've been thinking a lot lately about the principles that comprise "plain language," I've also been thinking about George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. And if the timeliness of this essay wasn't established already, OTM - discussing what it means when the media use "normalizing," "politically correct," "alt-right," etc. - brought it home fiercely.
Maybe 36 hours after the election was the first time I heard "don't normalize Trump!" That's a tremendously important sentiment.*
But it's important to recognize what we mean when we caution not to "normalize" something. To look out for the dilution of this key concept into a trendy catchphrase of the enlightened liberal. To guard against normalizing "normalize" lest we start spouting it mechanically and lose its original crucial meaning. We need to remember the stakes - that when anyone warns against "the normalization of Trump" it will never be against anything as benign as the presence of a shriveled tiny-handed man-ape in the country-slash-world's highest office. It's against the entire litany of hate crimes, injustice, cruelty, and predation, committed both by the President-elect and in his name, that's been documented many many many times before.
Even if catchwords and -phrases establish a common basis of understanding and facilitate a substantive discussion, we still have to be more cautious than ever about allowing their use to lead us into abdicating thought. As with the phrase "unarmed black man," there's a risk that the more we use the syllables of "don't normalize Trump," the more abstract the substance behind them becomes.
On this point, I'm in love with the "euphemism treadmill" which linguist John McWhorter explained on OTM. In describing the current advantages of "woke" over "politically correct" of 20 years ago, he said:
We need to get used to words needing to be replaced like that and to expect it... In these times, we look at the way that words keep changing in that way, that cripple becomes handicapped becomes disabled and so on, and we roll our eyes and we say, Well what's that all about? That's all about that any word is going to rust up and we're going to need something else. It's because we have these negative views... only when the thought changes will there not need to be this recycling of terms. And the recycling itself alone does not change the thought. It just outruns it for a while.
We need to keep our language sharp, and our expressions. That's why today's OTM and Orwell's essay are so critical. It's clearer than ever that the need to replace "rusted up" and "recycled" phrases is not about to evaporate. And Orwell describes how the only way we can avoid the laziness of thought, and thus political thought, and thus political action is by disavowing pre-fabricated phrases and instead expressing what those phrases mean.
But. How many ways can you say "white-supremacist-yet-ironically-orange chauvinist opportunistic trafficker of fear hatred and incompetence"? And even if that's the most precise descriptor - what happens when it too has lost significance?
*Side note: As if there weren't enough facts in the world to inspire
disgust, I'm apparently policing my language now. The original version
of this sentence read "a hugely important sentiment" but that got edited
out right quick. I can't say anymore that one consideration "trumps"
the other, and as far as I'm concerned our president for the next four
years is "He-who-must-not-be-named." Is it too late to miss Dubya?
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