usage

Has the meaning of “refute” changed?

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This week I came upon a bizarre claim in an Associated Press article: “The federal law that President Joe Biden signed at the end of 2021 followed allegations of human rights abuses by Beijing against members of the ethnic Uyghur group and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has refuted the claims as lies and defended its practice and policy in Xinjiang as fighting terror and ensuring stability.” If AP was using the established meaning of “refute,” it was claiming that these allegations were lies and China had proven they were. The article didn’t say what this proof was.

However, it was called to my attention that some dictionaries give a new, second meaning for “refute.” Merriam-Webster gives two definitions: (1) to prove wrong by argument or evidence : show to be false or erroneous. (2) to deny the truth or accuracy of. Dictionary.com, on the other hand, gives two definitions that both entail proof: (1) to prove to be false or erroneous, as an opinion or charge. (2) to prove (a person) to be in error.
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There’s nothing wrong with these expressions

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I’ve written a lot of posts on the misuse of words and expressions. For balance, I should mention some that pedants object to, but I don’t. (“Pedant” is defined as someone who objects to usages I don’t object to.)

“I could care less.” The pedant says this should be “I couldn’t care less.” Don’t you understand irony? This is always uttered in a sarcastic tone, and it means something like “I could care less — if I really tried hard.” Do you also object to saying “Big deal!” to dismiss something unimportant?
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Britannica blunders 1

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The once-respected name of Britannica has really sunk. In an article on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, they misquote and misinterpret the most famous line of the play, while thinking they’re correcting a misconception.

The most famous line of the play, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”, is often misinterpreted. The archaic word wherefore does not mean “where”, but “why”, rendering the modern English translation as “Why are you, Romeo?”

That’s not what the line is! It’s “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” with no comma. Juliet isn’t asking why Romeo exists. She’s asking why he’s Romeo — meaning why he is Romeo Montague, a member of an enemy family. The next lines make this clearer: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.”
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What really is a theocracy?

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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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The misuse of “gaslighting” 1

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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.

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Words derived from authors

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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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What is a “conspiracy theory”?

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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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A word that will live in infamy

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Today’s post on word misuse is a tricky one to write. The word is “infamous,” and the difficulty is that I can’t tell what people even mean when they misuse it. Merriam-Webster’s main definition is “having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil.” The additional definitions are closely related: “causing or bringing infamy” and “convicted of an offense bringing infamy.” If you call a person infamous, you’re saying that person is rotten, vile, and contemptible. If you call an act infamous, you’re condemning it.

People seem to toss the word around just to add emphasis, with no specific meaning. I just saw a link on YouTube to a short referring to a statement attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” as “infamous.” I suppose someone might condemn Oppenheimer for saying that, though I don’t know why, but the video doesn’t do that.
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Another confusing term: “Critical Race Theory” 1

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Since I’ve done several pieces on terms that get misused or should be avoided, I’d like to look at one of the most controversial of all: “Critical Race Theory” or CRT. Its meaning in political activism is different from what it means in academic circles, and I’m not convinced either one is very self-consistent. I did a Web search for a piece that discussed the theory without the popular controversies, but search engines don’t make them easy to find. Many of the articles I found didn’t look trustworthy. I wrote a whole post on an article that I didn’t find very satisfactory and scheduled it for posting; then I found an entry in dictionary.com which is far better. So I’m dumping most of what I wrote before and starting over.

The article notes: “Critical Race Theory is a complex body of thought that encompasses multiple disciplines, and its concepts and conclusions are interpreted in different ways. Even the words in its name are subject to debate as to what they mean or imply in the term itself or in general.” That says you won’t find one characterization everyone agrees on, even outside the fierce political controversies.
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One more word to avoid: “Woke”

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Let me start by admitting I had tried to use the word “woke” in a meaningful way. To me it meant the bullying aspect of the left: shouting down speakers, kicking people out of conventions for expressing unpopular views, calling people who disagree “fascists” or “racists,” mobbing people on Twitter (sorry, “X”) for writing on topics not permitted to their skin color, calling for the firing of lawyers who take on disliked defendants, etc. The ones who declare “silence is violence” or “saying all lives matter makes you a Nazi.” In retrospect, I’m not so sure that was ever the predominant meaning of the term. Since authoritarian Republicans have started using the term, it’s become useless even if it had any value before.

This puts me in the weird position of agreeing with Donald Trump: “And I don’t like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it’s like just a term they use. Half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.” He’s used the term a great deal himself, but for a passing moment he was right.
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