The Clickbait Dictionary
Orwell thought sloppy language bred sloppy thinking.
In his essay, Politics and the English Language, 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 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,” he wrote. “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.”
With his effortless knack for saying in plain English the resonant and enduring, Orwell’s dictum is obvious as soon as uttered.
Orwell wrote that back in 1946. What would the author of Animal Farm and 1984 make of today’s standards?
‘Misogyny’ is overtaking ‘fascist’ in the ‘I Don’t Own a Dictionary’ championships.
Spend five minutes online, and you’ll encounter words defined in their starkest definitions. Words like ‘misogyny,’ ‘misandry,’ and ‘narcissist,’ once possessed specific meanings. Now they mean whatever the speaker claims they mean.
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.
According to The Guardian, the recent Finnish election was suppurated with misogyny and fascism.
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— Riikka Purra, Sanna Marin and Elina Valtonen—were all women. Women lead seven of the nine parties returned to parliament—including the ‘far-right’ Finns Party.
The Guardian didn’t permit reality to spoil a good headline.
As Orwell had it, ‘Fascism’ is a hollow word. In the essay mentioned above, he said: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” In modern parlance, the same applies to ‘misogyny.’ ‘misandry,’ ‘narcissism,’ ‘gaslighting,’ and just about every other buzzword shoehorned into a HuffPost headline.
To be polite, distinction is not the strongest suit of the social media age. Online, we scoff at ridiculous clickbait articles in which a ‘local woman lost 30 pounds in one week using this one simple trick.’ Reader, gym owners hate her! We may laugh, but much of our culture indulges in linguistic crimes.
A Daily Telegraph feature committed the same felony. The headline claimed Martin Amis’ work, The Rachel Papers, was a ‘misogynistic masterpiece.’
According to the Collins Dictionary, Misogyny means a hatred of women. Yes, some dictionaries have loosened their definition but modern usage seldom meets that charitable bar. Until recently, misogyny described an often violent hatred of women.
And what made The Rachel Papers misogynistic? In The Rachel Papers, the teenage protagonist Charles Highway habitually refers to women in sexual terms and rates women on account of their looks and sexual vitality. He describes the ‘crumbling’ bodies of both men and women over the ancient age of… 25. Charles also ignores an instance of domestic violence with a don’t-ask-don’t-tell 1970s glibness.
As regrettable as that may be, the now-deceased Amis wrote The Rachel Papers five decades ago. In fifty years, people will condemn as backwards much of what we consider enlightened. Hence the folly of presentism.
Perhaps the point is lost on some, but the novel is about the extremities of adolescence. By definition, obsession is of the extremity. The obsessive Charles pares the objects of his desire to their starkest elements. This heightens the theme of adolescent extremity and obsession. If Charles tempered his sentiments, he’d compromise the entire bloody theme of the novel—Oh, never mind.
Though Charles is often crude, he defies the lazy misogynist label. As far as I can see, not one sentence in The Rachel Papers suggests a hatred of women. Reader, it’s a comic novel about a precocious 19-year-old governed primarily by his nether regions. The Rachel Papers is not American Psycho.
Few question such errant language. Why not say, The Rachel Papers is a masterpiece of authentic adolescence?
Not only might such a suggestion refine one’s expression but someone else may disagree and refine it further. They might say Charles was louche. If they loved the novel, they might say the word you’re looking for is waggish. If they loathed the novel, they might say Charles was boorish or elemental. They might think and say he was a complete and utter wanker. They may be right. But a misogynist? No.
As Orwell pointed out, sloppy language breeds sloppy thinking.
Perhaps our Very Online, clickbait culture recruits the most lurid and most potent definitions to siphon attention amidst the spinning wheel of social media. Perhaps our crudity of mind begets our crudity of expression. Perhaps in our age of insecurity, stark terms offer a sense of surety. As the clickbait headlines go, dictionary owners hate us!
We employ lame and diseased language because our thinking is diseased and lame.
Admittedly, ‘For a host of complex, often irrational and utterly human reasons, someone was unfavourable to someone else today,’ doesn’t light up the sky. ‘Misogynist fascists ruin everything in total defeat for everyone everywhere,’ has a little more punch.
But which is true? Which is correct?
Reader, I realise I’m skipping along with a picnic basket in hand, to the Tet Offensive. But this stuff matters. Language distinguishes man from beast.
In a debate with William F. Buckley Jr. the great Anthony Burgess outlined why language standards are—to borrow a modern phrase—a thing.
Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, lamented a culture in which ‘words become mere counters for resentment and not devices for analysis.’ For Burgess, to simplify was to suffocate.
To illustrate his point, Burgess recalls a meeting with a student.
The student asks: “Hey, why did you write that fucked-up article in the New York Times?”
Burgess replies: “And what do you mean by ‘fucked-up’? Do you mean it was badly written? Do you mean it was ill-considered? Or do you mean you merely don’t like it?”
Nowadays, Burgess may seem pedantic or starchy. But he had a point. Burgess feared that untamed language bred the crude thoughts of a derelict culture.
By claiming the unflattering is misogyny, the disagreeable is narcissism, that this is toxic and that is gaslighting, we disembowel language. The scalpel becomes the machete.
At this rate, why bother with words at all? We might as well grunt once for approval, and twice for disapproval.
Too often, what we say is the crazy cousin to what we think. To borrow a modern phrase, this is not good. And please, grunt once if you agree.
Increasingly, in court, I’m getting answers to hostile questions with “that’s not what I meant”. My reply, “but it’s precisely what you said”, is always met with an odd mix of indignation and bafflement.
The word Misogyny may well be used a lot in the wrong context but it’s certainly not used enough in the correct way to describe most of the stuff currently directed at and suffered by women. Abortion criminalised, sterilisation denied, single sex spaces removed, the rights of women to compete fairly in sports under debate or denied. Vulnerable women imprisoned with men. Female victims of rape forced to refer to their rapists as ‘she’ in court. This week John Hopkins University, in their LGBTQ resources glossary defined Lesbians as “non-men attracted to other non-men”. NON FUCKING MEN.
Misogyny is getting worse and has become insidious, in my lifetime it has never been as hateful as it seems now.
Maybe because when words are over used or more often used incorrectly they stop having the impact they were intended to have. When everything became transphobic I stopped caring about being called a transphobe, it’s constant use as a battering ram to shut people (mostly women) up rendered it meaningless to me.