“I don't know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant ‘there's a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass (1871)

At Oxford I took a module on International Relations. My tutor for this course was a Canadian graduate student, and one week she dedicated our study to what she told us had been the focus of her entire career to date: her belief that if “environmental issues” were renamed to “environmental security”, conservatives would all support it because conservatives like “security”, and that this would magically bypass conservatives' prior reluctance to prioritise environmental issues. She said she had published papers on this and, if I remember correctly, it was also the on-going subject of her graduate thesis. I was as tactless and angry then as I am now, and told her to her face that this was nonsense, and went into detail as to why. By the end of the tutorial she was trying to avoid tearing up, and my tutorial partner gently reproached me for demolishing her work so aggressively as we walked out. “But it was nonsense!” I replied. I will not attempt to make the case that my robust approach serves any persuasive purpose—it is not a way to make friends or influence people—but as even my tutorial partner had to concede, I had not been wrong.

The point of this anecdote is that, although this was an especially silly example, it arose from a much wider trend in non-realist liberal thought which believes that the directionality of attitudes is determined by the directionality of words, not vice versa. They believe that if they can manipulate the words used by their opponents they can win their arguments by default. This of course betrays a certain defeatist nihilism: if your beliefs are so certainly true that you proselytise them at all costs, even by deceit, why are you incapable of defending them openly, rather than having to resort to such shabby subterfuge? But more fundamentally, this model of behaviour is not how the world actually works.

I will here take a brief look at some history of this belief, and then some examples of the attempts to deploy this theory. Along the way I will try to explore the philosophical errors underlying the theory, and why it has become so popular.

A Brief History Of Pejoration

The satirical Humpty Dumpty quote above, from over 150 years ago, shows that this is not a new phenomenon. After all, there is nothing wholly new under the sun: history proceeds in non-linear recursive cycles. Pre-modern cultures often used euphemisms to avoid mentioning taboo subjects. The word “bear” is perhaps the oldest known euphemism, meaning something like “the brown one”, speculated to be a way of superstitiously avoiding saying the older Proto-Indo-European word for bear, something like reconstructed “rkto”. The effect was, of course, that “bear” (and its variants) promptly became the word for bears in those languages, because words are not magical, and instead simply refer to the objects described by them, so that the words will soon adopt all of the properties of the real objects they describe.

Later societies, no longer fearing constant bear attacks, instead had taboos around sex and religion¹. The word “cunt” may have its roots in a euphemistic use of a word for “sheath”, or some other euphemism. The word “fuck” was probably a euphemistic use of a word for striking or scratching. The word “shit” was probably a euphemism for splitting off from the body. All inevitably took on the taboo sense of those bodily functions.