what’s in a word?

do ghosts waft from my mouth? “shit”, I say, “jesus christ”, “damn”, and “fuck”. clearly now, I have affronted God. this is the christian theory of “words you cannot say”. in answering the question of what words should and should not be said, ghosts are clearly a vapid explanation.

these kinds of ghosts are a large part of the canon of cultural norms. cultural norms inform conceptions of morality and justice quite heavily. but while cultural norms certainly change quite a bit, perhaps rapidly, any conception of morality that actually posits that what is right and wrong in and of itself changes over time I find intensely objectionable¹.

a defining property of cultural norms is that people by and large adhere to, as well as enforce them. deviating from them may incur offense, ire, exclusion, or violence. this can be greatly unjust. there is an endless fractal of bigotry upon which these norms are propped. normative behavior is that of the neurotypical, the cisgender, the heterosexual, the white. there is progress in unraveling it, but it is fundamentally broken. it remains the case that if you are not within these bounds even slightly, it is as if it has been smelled on you, and you may experience incredible violence.

however, those who have the most resources to complain the most loudly about cultural norms must ironically be out of those people the most benefitted from them. as, if they were the most victimized, then they would be deprived of such extraordinary resources to espouse this. affluence and prominence are mutually exclusive with ostracization.

when the affluent decry changes to cultural norms, it is really a reflection of how they benefit quite heavily from them and how they see that they stand to lose these benefits. when changes in popular perception minorly benefit a disadvantaged group of people, and such great affront is taken in this minor adjustment, so that it is considered to be some sort of apocalyptic cataclysm, this could not convey anything more clearly than a visceral hatred of this group of people!

evidently, cultural norms are a poor guide for what you should and should not do.

but you should care about other people. the most important thing is that you care about other people. how this can be determined with such great confidence is left as an exercise to the reader. when you say something to someone, it is less important that it is within the constraints of the relevant normative behavior than that it does not negatively affect the other person. speech is an action to which you are accountable.

not only does what you say affect other people, but other people become a party to what you say, to a certain extent. associating with a person can be a form of reifying and legitimizing their behavior. if this behavior is wanton and hurts others, one may be complicit in this.

but what do words have to do with any of this? nothing inherently. as established, words are not ghosts, for there are no ghosts. words are an empty vessel for what they convey. but they do convey.

blame for what words convey is often placed upon the words themselves. either to revile or to revere it, the concept of some platonic “list of words you can’t say anymore” is frequently invoked. there is actually some viability in this kind of approach. prompting a change in terminology invites thinking differently about things. and oftentimes a word has enough baggage to be highly disturbing even if as a vessel it is empty of actual malicious content. but this approach is also vastly limited; whether or not a word being disturbing is a problem is highly contextual, and telling people that they “aren’t allowed” to say a word is wont to invigorate an individualist fervor that is impossible to reason with.

the most harm in a word is surely what lies behind it. actually hateful speech cannot be remedied by playing word games. the ideas themselves must be corrected.