WAR OVER WORDS

Kory Stamper wrote an interesting piece in The New York Times titled “America’s Uncivil War Over Words.”

“Americans can’t agree on much these days.  They’ve obviously fallout over politics.  They can’t even agree on the facts.  Now they’re fighting over words.”  1.

These pages have been saying this for months now.  These pages advocated the theory that the election was the result of a failure of words.   See, for example, NATIONAL WORDS, BERGER; WORDS DON’T COUNT,   WHERE THE NO WORDS ARE,  or WAR ON LANGUAGE.

As has been said again and again in these pages, visual is super-ordinate over the lingual.  See NO LINGUISTIC FRAMEWORK.  We are, fundamentally, visually oriented beings.  Yet our culture is language based.  The elevation of the lingual exacerbates mis-understandings.  If the visual and lingual were given at least equal cultural weight, we would produce better human beings with a greater propensity for mutual understanding.

Stamper is a lexicographer.  They are in the best position to track the evolution, or de evolution, of the language.  And they note that citizens now furiously attack accepted definitions of words.  They also provide an interesting history of the dictionary.  By their account, part of our national history is the waging of war on words and what, exactly, is the accepted definition, over time.

It is a refreshing article.  It is good to understand that our current national confusion, as the result of words, is not exactly new.  It’s happened before.  Language evolves.  It is also good to read that a prominent lexicographer agrees that we have a war over words.

Right now, my concern is that because the stakes are so incredibly high, we may not be able to survive, as a democracy, this loss of common lingual understanding.

1.  Stamper, Kory.  “America’s Uncivil War Over Words.”  The New York Times.  15 April 2017.  Web.  16 April 2017.  URL.

And if the drawing above is not some form or word or letter, it should be.