by Ryan Schaller

Created on: November 23, 2009

It is impossible to communicate without some form of language. While some professionals like engineers and scientists use a highly technical language of symbols and formulas to share ideas, most of us communicate with the system of letters, words and grammar I am using now. Without language, debate, discussion and the sharing of ideas are impossible. Visual artists could argue otherwise, and they would be correct that various wordless forms of art are also capable of expression; however, the dominant form of discourse is the word, both spoken and written. Ironically, despite the importance of language to all of our communications, very little attention is paid to how we use words.

Any intelligent discussion of politics and language inevitably owes a debt to George Orwell's brilliant essay, "Politics and the English Language." Any argument must start with an assumption, and Orwell's fundamental assumption is that language is "an instrument which we shape for our own purposes" as opposed to the belief that "language is a natural growth" (see note 1). Language does not exist in a vacuum. Language only has the meaning that we give to it. Orwell is not making a giant leap of faith here. Since the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics" in 1916, this has been the trend of 20th century linguistics (see note 2). Saussure argued that language was the socially produced system by which we express ideas. Key to this is the assumption that language is arbitrary. Since the purpose of this article is to discuss the politics of language, not the history of 20th century linguistics, I'm going to proceed with these assumptions taken for granted instead of spending paragraphs trying to prove them what better minds than mine have already written extensively on the subject (see note 3).

The arbitrariness of words is most evident when we look at more abstract concepts. For example, the word "gay" has been one of the most arbitrary in the last half century of American life. Over the course of a few decades, gay has gone from meaning happy, to a sexual derogatory, to an accepted and even preferred tag for the homosexual community, to its current use by young Americans to mean "stupid." Can "gay" mean all of these things at the same time? Can something mean both happy and stupid? Can one word be used interchangeably to insult a group while the group simultaneously uses it for pride? (potentially contrast with the "n" word, which seems to still function

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