All war is a scam." Well, that's what a student in a class of mine told the professor as we were all sitting around waiting for class to start, anyway.
I hadn't been following the conversation closely, but that line jolted my attention away from my laptop. Diplomat that I am, I butted in to object that, in a scam, the initiator always has the intention of profiting by deceit. Who was the scammer in World War II, for example? Almost immediately, the other student backed down and revised his assertion to "war is rarely cost-effective for the public," which makes rather more sense.
Then why didn't he say that? I wondered.
A similar event occurred some weeks ago, when a friend of mine was talking about colonial explorers who had mistakenly concluded that a tribe they had met was cannibalistic. "How arrogant!" she proclaimed.
"That's not arrogance, exactly," I argued. "It's ignorant, certainly, and probably racist, but arrogance has to do with your opinion of yourself. How is refusing to assume that a different culture shares your taboos arrogant?"
She blinked at me for a second, then only replied, "How is it not?"
The same thing happens on a larger scale and on matters of more consequence. During last fall's presidential campaign, both candidates stated loudly and often that the so-called financial crisis was caused by "greed" in over-leveraging questionable assets. In fact, as recently as Monday our fearless leader, sitting atop a white horse and clad in shining armor asserted that AIG's recent troubles stem from its "recklessness and greed," which were to be purged with his blazing, double-edged sword, or something.
The trouble with that kind of talk is that the concept of a greedy company is ridiculous on its face. "Greed" means you want something, especially money, more than is moral. But what is the moral limit on a publicly traded corporation, which exists for the sole and express purpose of maximizing value for shareholders? In fact, such companies have the moral duty to perform as well for those shareholders as it can, which means it is essentially impossible for it to be greedy.
Now, I'm sure you're all very impressed at my ability to nitpick language, and I know that it's pretty much inevitable that I make a nitpickable mistake of my own in this column, but there is a larger point to all this: words matter.
That's not a new idea, of course. Orwell famously demonstrated it in 1984. It cropped up just a few weeks ago on campus in the attempted dust-up over the merciful removal of gender-neutral language--which is a linguistic tragedy and enemy to euphony everywhere-from the DSG constitution.
Words matter because-and I hope this isn't too technical for the layman to follow-we use them to communicate. Words exist for a reason. Each one has a shade of meaning slightly different from all the others.
When we use "scam" to mean "anything cost-ineffective," or allow it to be so used, what really happens is that we lose the word "scam"; it loses its precision and therefore its value. When we use "arrogant" to mean "thinking in a way I don't like," or "greed" to mean "making money in a way I don't like," then we lose those words from the language. Definitions become malleable and ultimately irrelevant, and connotation becomes everything.
This kind of linguistic rot all too often makes discussion of any serious, interesting or complex subject impossibly difficult. Instead of searching for the right word to describe something, we just blurt out the first one that registers a close-enough emotional impact.
So why is this happening? It's hard to say. I'm sure that it's partially because, as I argued at the beginning of the semester, we don't read enough anymore, either as a school or as a society. No doubt the influence of the Internet, the place where English goes to die, bears some of the blame as well. Just look what it's done to RLHS-"u r home?" Seriously, guys?
English is a good language. As Henry Higgens from "My Fair Lady" says, "it's the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible." I think it's a language worth defending while there's enough of it left to defend. If that means you've got to get in touch with your inner word-Nazi every now and again, then so be it. You might look like a jerk, but your children will thank you for it. If they can find the words.
Oliver Sherouse is a Trinity senior. His column runs on Wednesdays.
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