An oligarchy is a government run by a small number of people. If a country is an oligarchy, it’s not a democracy. It might have the appearance of democracy, with elections for show, but the ruling insiders call all the shots. Some countries fit this description. Most would say that the United States doesn’t, and until recently claiming it is would have fallen under crazy conspiracy theories.
It’s getting more popular, though, to claim the USA is an oligarchy. An article in The Nation, not usually considered a fringe publication, is titled “It’s Official: America Is an Oligarchy.” Its “evidence” is that some people are very rich. Today I saw a post by Robert Reich casually taking it for granted that we’re living in an oligarchy, and a search turned up an article by him titled “How America’s oligarchy has paved the road to fascism (Why American capitalism is so rotten, Part 7)”. He makes it clear he understands what the word means, and he claims that the current American oligarchy emerged around 1980.
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English includes many nouns that end in “-um” or “-on” and are pluralized by changing the ending to “-a.” They come from Latin and Greek respectively. Examples include “medium,” “datum,” “ovum,” “criterion,” and “phenomenon.” As with everything else, the language isn’t consistent; we have museums, not musea; morons, not mora; polygons, not polyga. I wouldn’t complain if the language regularized the endings of all these words. “Bacteriums” and “phenomenons” would sound weird at first, but we could get used to it.
What’s happening instead is that people turn the plurals into singulars. With some words, like “data” and “media,” the change has been firmly established. Others are substandard but turn up often, like “a bacteria” or “a phenomena.” Recently I saw a writer friend who should know better talking about “a criteria.” This doesn’t make the words any more regular, since double-pluralizing “medias” or “datas” is still frowned upon. It leaves us with words that are the same in the singular and the plural.
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About a year and a half ago, I wrote about the overbroad use of the term “Fascism” and what it really was or is. Another political designation that gets freely tossed around is “theocracy.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.” This is too broad; governments of all kinds have claimed that God guides their heads of state. Listen to traditional patriotic songs, and you’ll hear lots of claims that the leaders act under God’s guidance.
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Recently I replied to an online point that said that if the US enacts laws that enforce Christian views, the country will be a theocracy. I pointed out that all or nearly all European countries for most of history have met that criterion and that the USA itself was a “theocracy” by that measure until at least the 1960s. The person making the post rebuked me for being a “prescriptivist” and implied it’s consistent with being a libertarian.
First, it’s not a political issue. I don’t advocate laws requiring people to use words with standard meanings, except in legal documents. Aside from that, I’m not exactly a prescriptivist. I prefer to consider myself a “consistentist.” Whatever meaning you give to a word, stick with it and don’t conflate it with other definitions. If you want to use “glory” to mean “a nice knock-down argument,” don’t use it to mean “splendor” at the same time.
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The term “gaslighting” has become popular on social media. “To gaslight” means — or at least once meant — to manipulate people to make them think they’re insane. Today the word often serves as an all-purpose tool for attacking someone who says you’re wrong.
A Time article discusses the stretching of several psychological terms, including gaslighting:
Perhaps the most often misconstrued word of the past few years, “gaslighting” has been widely adopted as a way to describe any act that’s insensitive, a lie, or simply a difference of opinion.
A few months ago, an office at the University of Southern California declared that the word “field” is racist. They “explained” this absurdity as follows:
This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the memo reads. “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”
That is, many slaves have worked in fields, therefore the word “field” is racist. But as Metatron has pointed out on YouTube, slaves have been made to work in houses, so the word “house” must be racist by the same standard. Self-appointed or university-appointed arbiters of language have similarly declared other words, such as “master,” racist. The Firefox browser, which I’m using to write this, now has a “primary password,” “formerly known as master password.”
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This post is inspired by an online discussion of how the word “Orwellian” should be used. One person argued it should refer only to authoritarian dictatorships. I disagreed. That got me thinking of other words based on authors’ names, such as “Kafkaesque,” “Machiavellian,” and “Dickensian.” How broadly or narrowly should we use those words? Is there any basis for agreement?
The subject here is words that are reminiscent of something in the author’s work. Adjectives that denote the author’s ideas directly, such as “Jeffersonian,” “Marxist,” and “Freudian” are easier to deal with; they should refer to something the author has said, or they’re being used incorrectly. But words that indicate reminiscences are trickier. Any writer worth becoming an adjective writes about more than one thing and approaches them from more than one angle.
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A conspiracy theory, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.” Alternatively, it’s “a theory asserting that a secret of great importance is being kept from the public”; the idea presumably is that insiders have conspired to keep the truth hidden.
Dictionary.com takes a similar approach: “a theory that rejects the standard explanation for an event and instead credits a covert group or organization with carrying out a secret plot” or “a belief that a particular unexplained event was caused by such a covert group.” In all these cases, a conspiracy theory requires a conspiracy to make something happen or to keep something hidden. The cabal has to be hidden and the conspirators powerful; an accusation that some people got together to plan a crime doesn’t count as a conspiracy theory unless the perpetrators are extremely rich or powerful.
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The first time I ran into the term “hate speech” was on a mainstream political site that assured the reader that it was not advocating censorship but linked prominently to a site whose title was “Hate speech is not free speech.” From its beginning, “hate speech” has been what Ayn Rand called an “anti-concept,” a term that doesn’t define a category with specific characteristics but serves to obscure the speaker’s intent. The term is and has always been a call for censorship.
Hatred is an emotion and can be good or bad. Hating tyranny and deadly diseases is good. Hating people for their sexual preferences or skin tones is bad. Either way, it isn’t really the emotion that matters; it’s what people do and say. What’s actually wrong is spreading falsehoods, uttering gratuitous insults, using appearance as a proxy for character, making threats, and suppressing people with discriminatory laws and violence.
“Hate speech” doesn’t mean speech expressing hatred. In practice, it means “speech I hate” or “speech I want banned.” Saying “I hate spinach” or even “Fuck J.K. Rowling” isn’t considered hate speech. Grossly insulting everyone who registers Republican isn’t hate speech. However, I’ve seen claims that drawing a picture of Muhammad and saying “there are no atheists in foxholes” are hate speech.
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