Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
–George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946.
As time goes on, the semantic structure of commonly spoken English is subject to change. In 1946, Orwell wrote aboutthe decadence of the English language as he saw it. In his essay, Politics and the English Language, he covered various examples of contemporary English writings. Looking back at it now, it certainly seems like a whole different world. The examples he gave are quite the opposite to what one would experience today, outside of perhaps some social science circles and niche communities. To use his briefest example:
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
-Professor Lancelot Hogben, Interglossa
The verbosity and vocabulary are both immediately striking, with words like “vocables” and “collocations” finding themselves in use. Orwell critiques this prose, referring to it’s vagueness and sheer incompetence, among other key points such as an analysis of it’s pretentious diction. It seems Orwell certainly had a point.
But how quickly things change! Modern English prose seems to have experienced a total inversion, and that has been quickly hijacked. The overuse of “like” in sentences or incessant analogies may come to mind. It seems that contemporary semantics in articles are now more clear and to the pointin writing, but this comes with a price. Terms such as “misinformation” come to mind, or even more recently, “the freedom to be safe from gun violence.” To wit, the freedom to be safe from gun violence sounds great, but in it’s contemporary use as a phrase is shrouded the idea that revoking gun ownership freedoms is a freedom-granting thing, and that somehow one can just be guaranteed to be free from experiencing crime. Both misinformation and the freedom to be safe from gun violence don’t sound terrible or misleading alone, which grants them their strength, their semantic supremacy.
Misinformation is, according to Oxford Languages, “false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.” This is nothing more than a benign definition. However, when taken in context, it’s a particularly dangerous concept. The term necessitates the idea that there is inherently true information – which philosophically, can be argued to not exist. Philosophy aside, there is information that is generally agreed upon as being true, such as the sky is blue. Under this definition, it stands to reason that saying “the sky is green” is misinformation. It is false and inaccurate based on the generally accepted idea that the sky is blue.
This example makes it’s own caveats. One is that just because the majority agrees that the sky is blue, does not mean that the sky is blue. If every person on earth decided that the earth was flat, this would not make it so. This is also known as the “bandwagon fallacy.” Another caveat is that someone saying “the sky is green” would not be automatically wrong or a peddler of misinformation, rather they would ideally be granted the chance to make their argument – imagine, instead, that the argument was about what car between two cars is more reliable instead of the color of the sky. Finally, most threateningly, the word implies that an individual or group can be the arbiter of truth, which is definitively and completely incorrect. Some would disagree.
One other important detail of modern semantics is abstraction. Nearly ubiquitously, political positions are defined as “left wing” or “right wing,” or derogatorily “far left” and “far right.” No position in itself necessarily ties itself to some abstract axis unless they constantly stand a trial by association, which in itself is a tool of semantic supremacy. By drumming up fear of the far right or far left, the labels can then be semantically used as weapons, even on fairly benign opinions that were on the “other side” of the political spectrum recently. This can also be called making an enemy image, or sometimes just plain strawmanning.
Other similar trial by association methods exist, such as labeling legitimate critiques as “conspiracy theories,” a quick way to relate legitimate critiques to something thought of as genuinely crazy, such as vaccines being nanobots or the earth being flat. A somewhat believable example is this: most Americans don’t believe the official narrative on the JFK assassination.
Misinformation is a great example of semantic supremacy, because of it’s succinctness and it’s ability to hide context and agendas. You can rest assured that in almost every instance, anyone labeling anything as “misinformation” is peddling an agenda, consciously or subconsciously. A pertinent, relevant example is coronavirus.
In the United States, the government battled for years to institute lockdowns and censor “misinformation” about the inefficacy of vaccinations for coronavirus. An example linked above and here is relevant. The U.S. Government, under the guise of protecting people from misinformation, pressured Meta to censor COVID-19 content, particularly vaccine-critical content. Hilariously enough, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, retired in 2022 and almost immediately published a paper not covered in the media regarding how actually ineffective the COVID-19 vaccines actually were, showing that at least some of the “misinformation” was “information,” as in correct information, distinctly illustrating the fragility of “misinformation” and showing that no entity is the arbiter of truth.
The example about free speech above is perhaps even more dangerous. For a U.S. vice presidential candidate, one of, if not the first country founded on the enlightenment ideas of liberty and freedom of expression, to be talking about suppressing free speech under the guise of suppressing misinformation and hate speech, is a grave tiding. To be clear – spreading blatantly wrong information or being needlessly hateful is certainly nothing to be celebrated, but it is a necessary sacrifice if freedom of expression and speech is to be a right. The first amendment of the United States Constitution, verbatim: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It is, absolutely and objectively illegal and contrary to the founding document of this country to limit free speech in any way, shape, or form. This is true regardless of how talented a jurist arguing otherwise is. The idea that this is untrue is another example of semantic supremacy, exemplified in the terms “hate speech” and “misinformation” somehow being legitimate reasons to suppress free speech.
This is related to the general ignorance of a good portion of the population. Often, people refer to “the weight of evidence” or the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on a topic. This often likely stems from ignorance on what science as an institution actually does. First, science as an institution is very biased, particularly at the funding and journal levels. Funding is by and large dependent on what’s popular, successful, and likely to produce results, and journals and the scientists that review them are often unwilling to publish dissenting results. Tangentially, plenty of studies also study “A” and “B” to examine their effects, but neglect “C,” which may be more effective than “A” or “B”. To be true, the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on a topic is likely a good indication that it’s pretty believable and makes sense, and should not be discounted on it’s face. Science also does not prove anything – nothing that science as an institution does, or publishes, will ever be true. Essentially, theories are never objectively true – they are just supported a great number of times, but can always be falsified (hyperlink: https://www.britannica.com/topic/criterion-of-falsifiability). This is true for every single scientific concept, law, and theory, including Newton’s laws and the laws of Thermodynamics. This means that while the weight of evidence and overwhelming scientific consensus are very important heuristic tools in determining what to believe – it would be fairly foolish to believe, for example, that food is not a necessity to continue existing – they do not make anything true. There is no golden goose in pure science.
As a tangential example, the story of Edward Snowden is also relevant. Snowden, working in top secret government institutions, contributed to possibly the most massive surveillance program in world history, perhaps eclipsing even the Stasi of the DDR. This program was authorized in part by the Patriot Act, a wide-sweeping law involved in “stopping terrorism.” The name itself is another example of semantic supremacy, PATRIOT actually being an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” One way it “strengthens America” is by allowing law enforcement the right to search property and records of citizens without a warrant. He believed, correctly, that the government is subject to the people in an ideal democracy, and as a whistleblower revealed the depths of U.S. government surveillance on it’s own citizens. For this, he is now an exile in Russia and widely viewed as a traitor. While there is no direct semantic flourish here, the idea that someone can be viewed as a traitor for revealing complex unconstitutional surveillance programs against the very people that they are supposed to be made to protect is very telling.
Above are just pertinent examples, but there are many more. The core concept is that core institutions of American and broadly English-speaking culture have become particularly talented at labels and prose, allowing the near total distortion of commonly accepted concepts with only some semantic wordplay. Their semantic skill is supreme, and holds sway over many people. This plays hand in hand with the media’s near total control on public opinion and manipulation of the Overton window, whether conscious or subconscious. It’s very important for the average citizen to be mindful of this, and critically think about each point and opinion encountered in itself. We can hope that in the future, semantics becomes a tool of good prose rather than a tool to mislead.