{"id":82834,"date":"2023-06-14T03:00:52","date_gmt":"2023-06-14T07:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=82834"},"modified":"2023-06-13T11:38:52","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T15:38:52","slug":"misogyny-is-overtaking-fascist-in-the-i-dont-own-a-dictionary-championships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/06\/14\/misogyny-is-overtaking-fascist-in-the-i-dont-own-a-dictionary-championships\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;&#8216;Misogyny&#8217; is overtaking &#8216;fascist&#8217; in the &#8216;I Don\u2019t Own a Dictionary&#8217; championships&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/oxfordsour.substack.com\/p\/the-clickbait-dictionary\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Christopher Gage<\/a> suspects that George Orwell lived in vain:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Orwell-quote-about-language-from-Politics-and-the-English-Language.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Orwell-quote-about-language-from-Politics-and-the-English-Language-480x480.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"480\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-78981\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Orwell-quote-about-language-from-Politics-and-the-English-Language-480x480.jpg 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Orwell-quote-about-language-from-Politics-and-the-English-Language-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Orwell-quote-about-language-from-Politics-and-the-English-Language-120x120.jpg 120w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Orwell-quote-about-language-from-Politics-and-the-English-Language-50x50.jpg 50w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Orwell-quote-about-language-from-Politics-and-the-English-Language.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In his essay, &#8220;Politics and the English Language&#8221;, George Orwell lamented the decline in the standards of his mother <a href=\"https:\/\/www.orwellfoundation.com\/the-orwell-foundation\/orwell\/essays-and-other-works\/politics-and-the-english-language\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">tongue<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>For Orwell, all around him lay the evidence of decay. Orwell argued sloppy language came from and led to sloppy thinking:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language [&#8230;] It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With his effortless knack for saying in plain English the resonant and enduring, Orwell&#8217;s dictum is obvious as soon as uttered.<\/p>\n<p>Orwell wrote that back in 1946. What would the author of <em>Animal Farm<\/em> and <em>1984<\/em> make of today&#8217;s standards?<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&#8220;Misogyny&#8221; is overtaking &#8220;fascist&#8221; in the &#8220;I Don&#8217;t Own a Dictionary&#8221; championships.<\/p>\n<p>Spend five minutes online, and you&#8217;ll encounter words defined in their starkest definitions. Words like &#8220;misogyny&#8221;, &#8220;misandry&#8221;, and &#8220;narcissist&#8221;, once possessed specific meanings. Now they mean whatever the speaker claims they mean.<\/p>\n<p>The beauty of the English language lies in its precision. Sadly, those who populate the land which spawned the English language wield the language with all the grace and precision of a meat hook.<\/p>\n<p>According to <em>The Guardian<\/em>, the recent Finnish <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2023\/apr\/04\/misogyny-finland-sanna-marin\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">election<\/a> was suppurated with misogyny and fascism.<\/p>\n<p>In that election, the one debased in misogyny and fascism, the losing incumbent Sanna Marin, a woman, won more seats in parliament than in 2019. The three candidates with the most votes \u2014 Riikka Purra, Sanna Marin and Elina Valtonen \u2014 were all women. Women lead seven of the nine parties returned to parliament \u2014 including the &#8220;far-right&#8221; Finns Party.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Guardian<\/em> didn&#8217;t permit reality to spoil a good headline.<\/p>\n<p>As Orwell had it, &#8220;Fascism&#8221; is a hollow word. In the essay mentioned above, he said: &#8220;The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies &#8216;something not desirable&#8217;.&#8221; In modern parlance, the same applies to &#8220;misogyny&#8221;. &#8220;misandry&#8221;, &#8220;narcissism&#8221;, &#8220;gaslighting&#8221;, and just about every other buzzword shoehorned into a HuffPost headline.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Gage suspects that George Orwell lived in vain: In his essay, &#8220;Politics and the English Language&#8221;, George Orwell lamented the decline in the standards of his mother tongue. For Orwell, all around him lay the evidence of decay. Orwell argued sloppy language came from and led to sloppy thinking: A man may take to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,28,53],"tags":[603,354,400,213,1020],"class_list":["post-82834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-media","category-politics","tag-finland","tag-georgeorwell","tag-language","tag-newspapers","tag-progressives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ly2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82835,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82834\/revisions\/82835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}