Words Matter

 Names, also words, matter, see On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

In my stories – which might not be a good example from the rejections piling up – I have tried to be careful with names. In my Webster County stories, I named one of the county's small towns, Faulkner, for a particular reason. I used names of some friends for inside jokes. I did not want to be as obvious as Dickens. K.M. Weiland has a succinct, on-point video on this subject:

I thought Orwell's Politics and the English Language had been the last word on how politicians misuse our language, but Chris Cillazza serves up another reminder in his Why words no longer mean anything in politics

The truth is that what MTG said makes zero sense. Like, none. Communism has nothing to do with whether or not Trump should have been indicted. If you spend 5 seconds thinking about it, you would realize that.

But no one — or at least MTG’s target audience — doesn’t spend those precious seconds thinking about it. They see the word “communist” and immediately rush to mash the “like” and “retweet” (or whatever it’s called now) button.

That this sort of lowest common denominator stuff works is depressing. We need a politics where the language you use is tied to some sort of shared reality. And where just popping off and labeling everything “communist” doesn’t, well, work.

I confess to being Flaubert looking for the mot juste – I am not that good. I hope to find the most honest words possible to my wizened gray cells. If we are writing, we are defending our culture. We cannot be like demagogues and mangle our meanings for that disrespects our culture.

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