The Pulchritudinous Foppling of Nigmenogs
Language changes over time. You’ll probably, like me, have to look up all the definitions of the words in the title. Nigmenog is the most problematic. It used to mean simply a very silly fellow, but it eventually got shortened and mutated and used as a racial slur. It’s original meaning had no such racial connotation.
Much of the current culture war is being fought on the battlegrounds of language and what it is used for. This is, perhaps, most evident on the gender front of that war; what the word woman means these days, for example, is something of a hotly debated topic.
The idea arose from a group of pretentious French pedos postmodern philosophers that language was a fundamental component of the exercise of power; those who got to define the narrative, or define the norms and meanings, were those who had the power to do so. Language, in this perspective, became a tool to maintain power and to oppress others. With language you could create a desired reality. Language is not objective and its use should be deconstructed to trace the tendrils of power that exist in any interaction.
Or something like that.
I’ll be honest; I haven’t actually read the original texts. I’ve read enough samples of their writing, however, to know that I’d rather nail my testicles to a table, or shave my head with a lawnmower, than to wade through one of their full works.
The problem I have with much of this and, indeed, with much of “woke” ideology is the ridiculous amount of exaggeration that goes on. Everything is so over-the-top, so overblown, not so much drag queen as Drama Queen.
We have trans “genocide”, trauma counselling for those who attend lectures containing ideas they might not like, horror and outrage at people who think that maybe sex is an important category that has primacy over gender, and so on. I’m sure you can think of many more examples.
The postmodernists have a point, but only up to a point. Language can certainly be used to shape and influence things, it can be used as a tool to exercise power.
But most of the time I use it to communicate with another human being; I’ll have a bitter and my friend will have a lager. That sort of thing.
I used to ask my students to try to convey the difference between 2 cows in a field and 3 cows in a field without resorting to the concept of number. At some point in our past we developed this idea of number. Some new language had to be invented. It had fuck all to do with the exercise of power and everything to do with our desire to communicate with one another. Musing about the origin of maths is kind of fun. But I have a very strange notion of fun.
In this vein I imagine Og and Zog out on a hunt some thousands of years ago.
Og : Zog, watch out. There’s a sabre-toothed tiger just behind you
Zog : that’s just your subjective truth. You’re exerting a power differential and attempting to . . . aaaaaaargh!
Og (running away) : no, you silly fucker, I was trying to tell you your head was about to be bitten off
This is the problem when you let academics out into society without their carers. They’ll turn the most basic and trite stuff into verbose gobbledegook that requires several dictionaries, a thesaurus, and copious amounts of hallucinogenic substances to understand.
The original idea behind intersectionality, for example, was mildly interesting and made sense; you couldn’t simply treat different kinds of discrimination as if they were independent. Pretty soon after this eminently sensible idea surfaced we were suddenly suffused with all sorts of invisible webs of oppression that interacted and intersected in all sorts of marvellous and hypothesised ways and acted everywhere and at all times.
It was as if all sorts of half wits had tried to write a musical piece - Variations on a Note of Paganini - and ended up with some cacophony.
If you want to hear how a musical variation on a theme sounds in the hands of someone who actually knew what they were doing, then Rachmaninoff’s 18th variation on a theme of Paganini is definitely pulchritudinous (3m 07s).
Today’s “woke” ideology reminds me of my daughter’s primary school orchestra; fantastically enthusiastic honking, bashing, and scraping that only a parent could love.
The problem with all of these narratives, constructed from a movement that purportedly eschewed narratives, is that they’re a kind of semi-intellectual layering on something that is much more basic and fundamental - and simple. They’re a pseudo-intellectual layer of exaggeration.
As I intimated above - the primary function of language is to communicate.
They try to make it all about power and oppression without recognizing that basic truth and that, actually, the exercise of power and authority is not necessarily always a bad thing. Hierarchies exist for a reason - and often those reasons have little to do with power.
There’s a reason why your brain surgery is being performed by Dr Arrogante and not Ethel who runs the coffee shop on the hospital’s ground floor - and that reason has nothing to do with any exercise of power.
The exercise of power comes about when Dr Arrogante starts thinking of himself as a superior being to Ethel and deserving of more status and privilege. Most of us kind of play along with that too. We’ll probably treat the doc with more deference and respect because he’s better at slicing heads open than making coffee. His speciality is rarer and consequently more highly valued.
The problem that the pronoun police don’t seem to grasp in their own exercise of power over others is that trying to understand a page full of they’s and them’s is almost impossible; which fucker is the ‘they’ referring to here? Is it the same fucker as the last ‘they’ or is it a different fucker this time? And who’s this ‘xir’ dingbat that’s just appeared?
It’s true that language can be ambiguous and misused; it can be used to heal or hurt, to oppress or to uplift. But, fundamentally, it needs to operate within some core set of more or less universally agreed meanings. Otherwise it just becomes a kind of meaning-free noise. This is because its primary purpose is that of communication.
I would also argue that some limited ambiguity and subtlety is essential. Without this our literature and poetry would not be half so impactful.
A large part of my issue with “woke” is that I have little to no (and usually no) idea what the hell they’re talking about. In a recent piece I highlighted some examples from the annual jolly of the American Anthropological Association.
It could be that I’m just too dim to understand these sophisticated thinkers, but when confronted with a paper title like Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness I’m going to put my money on the supposition that I’m not the dimwit here.
I spent a bit of time this morning trying to see what “whiteness” was and what its characteristic were. Basically it means the following:
Anything that we don’t like is whiteness
The examples given could equally apply to many cultures - they’re not uniquely characteristic of white societies - but, hey, we need to make it whitey’s problem.
From Psychology Today, for example, we learn that
Whiteness is a forced group membership that originated by oppressing people of color (Williams, 2020). And, it causes psychological and spiritual damage to White people just as it damages non-Whites. White Americans are imbued with Whiteness from infancy, they do not choose it for themselves. People who look White and who have immigrated to America are generally afforded Whiteness upon arrival, whether they want it or not.
There are a couple more examples I just had to mention, and I’ve taken them from this (long) piece on the Heterodox Stem Substack (which is a great read). The authors of that piece mention some recently published papers. No doubt these were “peer-reviewed” and so they’re 100% absolutely true and correct1.
One paper talks about
the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism
I couldn’t read the actual paper as it’s behind a paywall - but seriously? This?
Language it is; communication it isn’t.
The paper also states
To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized
Our taxes are hard at work creating all of this new knowledge and understanding.
Like I said - academics should definitely not be allowed out into wider society without their carers.
I think I’d rather spend time listening to the most outrageous conspiracy theories than reading this kind of utter bilge - I’d learn more.
This is what happens when language becomes untethered from meaning; you get batshit crazy.
This is more than just an academic problem. This new neo-language has been gurgled by doubtless well-meaning academics for decades now. The problem is that it’s escaped from The Academy and it’s infecting everything.
All of you womb carriers, vulva drivers, and fully-paid up members of the Society of Chest Feeders are excluded from using the word woman or mother to describe yourselves because that would be non-inclusive.
And that’s just one example of this madness. Many would argue that it’s trivial, or that we shouldn’t care about it - it is just a minor change of wording so that everyone feels included isn’t it? Except that it isn’t - by their very own admission, language and what it means is important. You can’t simultaneously argue that language shapes everything whilst arguing that changing language is of minor consequence.
It’s just a pronoun. No. No it bloody well isn’t.
The Heterodox STEM piece also mentions that words like “homeless” and “smart phone” are now being proscribed. And even “hip hip hooray”.
Why, and how, have we ceded so much power to people who are definitely several letters short of an alphabet? The lights of their zealotry are burning brightly, but there’s no-one home. The hamster’s running like crazy, but the axle has rusted and so the wheel’s not turning. They say stuff, churning it out like some child in a Nike sweatshop, but it has no substance, no meaning.
They are so enthusiastic about their honking, bashing, and scraping, but it’s just a horrible noise that is unrecognizable as music.
Not that I ever would be, but if I was asked to give a course on postmodern philosophy it would be a very short lecture course consisting of just one lecture. It would be a very short lecture:
They said one or two decent things, but most of the time they just talked shit
On the (very) small chance you didn’t notice, this was sarcasm.
Here’s the problem for those of middling to average intellect. I speak as a woman here of decent but by no means outstanding smarts.
First, we were promoted along the academic assembly line and lauded for the smallest hints of promise by well-meaning people who thought this would help us and, even more importantly, save the culture from the sins of its past.
At some point, we learned that we were incapable of understanding the vocabulary and concepts of science and mathematics. Maybe we should have been sitting in the “for dummies” version of the class but we weren’t and it was too late to ask for a refresher on elementary concepts. Or maybe we should have been pouring coffee or doing any of a number of other valuable and worthwhile things.
But we’ve been told from the beginning that what matters is sitting in that private club and talking about things in a language that people outside the club struggle to grasp. Forget that the language of science and math exist to be as precise as possible; what we noticed was that it was all Greek to us, so we’re going to work on our new Greek. We get to feel like brilliant academics, which is where we get our sense of worth, and you to feel good because now academia is filled with the descendants of those who were discriminated against (possibly— for my brother is as much a product of my great and great great grandmothers as I am).
"[...] language was a fundamental component of the exercise of power; those who got to define the narrative, or define the norms and meanings, were those who had the power to do so."
I'm reminded of how words like "vaccine" and "case" and "misinformation" were redefined by Very Important Experts back in 2020 and 2021, so as to shame and ostracize dissenters.