Word Control as Political Tyranny

In his classic 1984, George Orwell writes that, “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 plus 2 make four.  If that is granted, all else follows.”   On the other hand, legal types frequently remind us that no one has the “freedom” to shout “fire” in a crowed movie theater.

As we all know, there is a clearly recognized continuing tension between free speech and restrained speech.  And where there is tension, there is opportunity for Machiavellian manipulation.  That manipulation has become more and more frequent in America; we even have coined the term “political correctness” to describe one form of language tyranny.

Because the language of political correctness has been discussed widely, I am less concerned about it than I am about a less well popularized mode of thought manipulation:  word warfare.

In Corner Canyon High School of Colorado, a brief word warfare skirmish occurred this month.  After the student body voted to call their teams “The Cougars,” the school board got bombarded by a few citizens offended by the term.  You guessed it:  the aggrieved ones regarded “cougar” as a sexualized word.

The January 20, 2012, the Huffington Post quoted school district spokeswoman Jennifer Toomer-Cook :

"The board said this is a brand new school and we want to unite the community. And if there's something out there that could divide it, let's not go there," Toomer-Cook told KSL-TV. "That's [the Board's] responsibility to look at all of the input and make a decision. [Media reports are] making it sound like it was already Cougars and we ripped it away from them.

Now, on the surface, the battle seems quite trivial.  One readily could argue that the district is within its rights to oppose the media’s supposedly making their naming decision for them.   I am not arguing about what is the “right” naming decision.   To my way of thinking, the real problem lies in accepting a few citizens’ interpretation of cougar as meaning “an older woman seeking a sexual or romantic relationship with a significantly younger man” as the article opines.  

Until a given word unambiguously denotes a meaning, its connotations reside in the minds of the listeners.  That, of course, means that the connotations are subject to all the idiosyncrasies and ideo-pathologies of those listeners.   Boisterous “oddballs” can ban together and resolve to scrub clean any and all words that for whatever reason strike them as offensive; they need not hold the majority belief, only the most stridently advocated one.

Let’s not let them.