Orwell warned us about elites who manipulate the masses by manipulating the language, and subsequent events have proven him to be more accurate than previously believed. It is our secular elites, in particular, who seek to control language so as to abet thought control. Before examining some recent examples, it is important to recognize that changes in our lexicon are not always the result of some sinister scheme.
For many years, those with low mental attributes were mostly called “imbeciles,” “morons,” and “idiots,” but in 1895 a new term was introduced that was considered less stigmatizing, “mental retardation.” But the shorthand, calling someone a “retard,” was later seen as patently offensive, so by the 1960s terms like “intellectual disability” became more acceptable. There was nothing nefarious about these linguistic transitions.
The same is true for describing the races.
“Colored people” was such a customary term in the early twentieth century that black Americans of African ancestry decided to call a newly established civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1909, it goes by the same name today. The United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944, also goes by the same name today, even though “negro,” like “colored people,” has fallen out of favor.
In the 1960s, “black” became the popular racial descriptive, and in the early 1990s it was replaced by “African American,” even though polls showed that the preferred term was still “black.” Again, this transition was not done to serve some political agenda.
The politicization of language today is most evident in the way we think about immigrants who have come to the United States illegally. Virtually everyone called such people “illegal aliens,” and that is because they were foreigners who entered the country by breaking the law. But in 2010, a “Drop the I-Word” campaign was launched to get rid of “illegal aliens” and replace it with “undocumented immigrant.” In 2013, the Associated Press dropped “illegal immigrant” from its stylebook after liberal scholars protested.
In 2014, under Obama, the government adopted more “inclusive” language. But it wasn’t until the Biden administration that “illegal aliens” was summarily rejected; this was in keeping with its “open borders” approach to immigration. Now that Trump is back in the White House, “illegal aliens” is also back. Unfazed, the New York Times likes to talk about “noncitizens.”
The best examples of twisting the language to accommodate the politics of elites are found by studying matters sexual.
Anyone doing research on violence committed by people who falsely claim to belong to the opposite sex will notice that what we call today “transgender” people were either called “transsexuals” or “transvestites” in the late 1990s. This can get really confusing. Before this century, reporters accurately referred to Jim, who chose Jane as his “transition” name, as Jim. Today he is called Jane and is falsely referred to as “she/her.”
Megyn Kelly created a firestorm in November when she said it was inaccurate to call Jeffrey Epstein a “pedophile.” She was not dismissing his monstrous acts, only pointing out that most of his victims were not prepubescent. I defended her, pointing out that when homosexual priests were being outed for abusing minors, they were falsely called “pedophiles,” so as to avoid calling them homosexuals. Yet only 3.8 percent of the victims of clergy sexual abuse met the clinical definition of pedophilia. The reaction against me was voluminous and vicious.
Another lexicon game is being played by those who refer to men who have sex with adolescents as “ephebophiles.” It’s a game because heterosexuals who abuse minors are never called “ephebophiles”—it’s selectively invoked to avoid referring to homosexuals when adult men molest teenage males.
Homosexuals began referring to themselves as “gay” in the 1920s, a decade of decadence in the West, and it became routine in the 1960s, another morally debased decade. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press ended their usage of “homosexual” in the 2010s and started using “LGBT,” which by now has taken on a never-ending alphabet of “persons.”
It was left to a New Zealand psychologist, Dr. John Money, to scrap our vocabulary of the term “sexual preference,” substituting “sexual orientation” instead. The Johns Hopkins professor was active in the mid-twentieth century manipulating the language to serve his sexual agenda. “Sexual preference” indicated that our attraction was a matter of choice, and that was taboo; “sexual orientation” accomplished his goal.
Money was not some disinterested “scientist.” He was a pedophile who sought to normalize man-boy sex, lobbied to eliminate the age of consent, and wanted to legalize father-daughter and mother-son sex.
When language is used to obfuscate, to confuse, and to manipulate, it is done to serve a cause, and should be condemned as such. When innocent people are hurt as a result, we are dealing with evil. Such persons—always the elites—do not want to elucidate, they want to dominate.
Language evolves, sometimes for noble purposes. Beware of instances when the motive is corrupt. When the end result is thought control, we are dealing with totalitarians.
