Words to go

The phrase, “a gay young man” has a totally different meaning today than it did a hundred years ago. Then it was a phrase describing a happy, maybe frivolous, but certainly pleasant young man– a compliment mostly. In fact, the word “gay” has been hijacked from our language and turned into a word bearing no relationship to its earlier, corporeal meaning. Its usage in the previous sense has been entirely eclipsed by this new meaning and the old one has completely disappeared from use. I doubt there is a person under fifty in the US who has ever used “gay” in any way other than to describe sexual orientation. There are several other words that have been drastically changed in meaning, good or bad, by the”sexual revolution.”

“Prostitute” is one that used to hold a very bad, negative connotation and has now become almost complimentary– at least in the entertainment world– and that includes sports, media news, and even politics. Of course, the entertainment world, now so revered by the public, traces its origins back to the camp followers and dancers who followed armies and provided sex for money. In fact, the synonymous word “hooker” originated as a description of a member of “Hooker’s army,” the large and well organized camp followers and sexual slaves General Hooker supported for his troops during the Civil War. With literally millions of “teeny boppers” adopting the dress, makeup and often the actions of prostitutes how long will it be before the word will be applied to any young girl and become synonymous to “young girl”?

After all, word usage, moral codes, dress standards, “normal” accepted behavior, even pejorative intents, change as meanings and peer acceptance or demands change. The media, all kinds of media, has become a powerful tool for this to the dismay of many and the joy of those media personalities who look for more and more shocking language and word usage to influence public actions, language and morals. The good or bad of this depends on where each individual stands in the moral or social spectrum at any given time. Those who decry our current “moral decay” and “destruction of family values” are merely reacting to these changes which are, like unruly children, pretty much out of their control. “Shock jock” Iiames was pretty much a victim of this ongoing conflict when he stepped just slightly over current bounds. Incidently, these boundaries are the opposite of fixed in any sense. They are constantly changing like edges of shapes in snow or desert sand by fickle, agenda driven winds from varying directions and force. Heaven help the individual who treads these amorphous shapes and happens to step on the wrong side of an edge at the wrong time. The media will glorify or condemn such actions at a whim or as moved by the direction of the winds of contemporary political agendas. These winds are driven and controlled almost entirely by someone’s or some group’s lust for power, money, or both. The vast majority of the common folk blow in these winds and exert little effort to change or resist them. Those in power count on this non-thinking, non-involvement to hold on to their positions of power.

Political labels are also changing as different groups of power brokers exert more or less influence. Those power brokers of the nineteenth century we dubbed “Robber Barons” are long gone, but their legacy lingers on, haunting all successful business people with strong negative images in a mostly media driven culture riddled with class envy and that describes “profits” as evil and depicts “businessmen” as dictatorial oppressors of the masses. “Governmentalists,” my term for the whole spectrum of “let the government do it” proponents come from a long history of anti-capitalist, anti-business, anti-establishment movements variously called, socialist, communist, populist, fascist, and even democratic. They gain their popularity by use of a human trait we could call “the Robinhood syndrome” or “take from the rich and give to the poor.” This, of course, is driven by envy and jealousy and exhibited by anger of the poor toward the rich. This force, variously named class envy or some other form of group envy, is evident where those that have the least are pitted against those who have the most, regardless of how either came to be in that stage. This pitting of the haves against the have nots, the rich against the poor, is often promoted with loud condemnation by the powerful and influential (and very wealthy) entertainment world in movies, TV shows, news broadcasts and such. Their animosity toward successful capitalists and industrialists and their portrayal of them as greedy oppressors is legion. Many very wealthy politicians use the same tactics to gain votes from the “poor and oppressed.” The truth is that in our country, those greedy individuals and organizations are the main source of revenue for all levels of government either directly through taxes or indirectly through wages paid to employees and then taxed by governments. This includes all payments for government services including social services and social security. The wealthiest five percent of our nation provide a hefty fifty percent of tax revenue mostly from gross profits of these businesses and industries.

Those media personalities and politicians who protest loudly at evils committed by the likes of the Enron crowd or the mischief of the dot com manipulators are not nearly as vocal about similar activities of wealthy members of the media, the legal profession, politicians mostly of the left and in particular, those with extreme wealth who support leftist policies and causes. Several studies have been conducted on the behalf of business organizations showing that business on both the personal and corporate level has a much lower incidence of dishonesty and criminal activity than does virtually any other major component of our nation including government, the professions, unions, the entertainment world including sports and media, and in particular, our elected officials who happen to have the worst record of any group examined. Of course, these studies are suspect since they were done by organizations that are not strongly anti-business. Surprisingly, university studies of the same subject seem to bear this out in spite of the strong anti-business, anti-capitalist leanings of the university environment. The realities of this do not at all indicate any innate honesty among members of the business community, but rather are the result of laws, controls and reporting requirements enacted to correct past abuses by those “robber barons” of earlier times. This body of business control legislation has been growing steadily for more than a hundred years. Very little such legislation encumbers or limits the activities of most other groups including labor unions and of course, our legislators who write such laws and determine such controls.

The legal profession is a special case because of their unique relationship with the body of law. Their members are an overwhelming majority in all legislative bodies, writing virtually all laws and then sitting on the judicial benches in judgement of those who are suspected of violating those laws. This gives them ample opportunity to provide “wiggle room” for legal maneuvering in much legislation providing long range benefits including “job security” for their colleagues. I’ll only mention in passing all the very special and expensive (to taxpayers) perks and privileges they are constantly granting themselves. Things like their own special and very generous health and retirement plan, virtually unlimited travel expense accounts, multi-million dollar well staffed luxury offices and then there’s all that pork and well hidden XXXX written into so much legislation for the sole purpose of buying votes. Of course, they have seen to it that such activities are all legal.

Is it any wonder that the latest polls show lawyers as one of the least trusted professions? How is it we tolerate our congressional public servants– that’s sure an oxymoron– who have the lowest approval rating ever recorded for Congress. Do you wonder why the media constantly harps on the President’s low approval rating but never mentions the much lower rating of Congress? The truth is obvious to all but the dullest and most prejudiced minds, and you know just who you are. Yes, words are changing just like everything else and many carry meaning with far more political impact than fact. I will finish this by mentioning a few.

Just a few in addition to those mentioned include: abortion, anti-war, bio-anything, criminal, Christian, endangered species, environmental, freedom, global warming, hunger, illegal immigrant, Islam, labor union, left wing, Muslim, nuclear, politically correct, politician, profit, protest, right wing, sexual orientation, socialist, terrorist, welfare, wetlands. There are thousands more.

Like many writers, I have a large vocabulary and in general, like most people, use not even a fraction of it on a daily basis. Quite frankly, most people don't really care about vocabulary. We live in a society in which words aren't used, they are made up or changed to new and different meanings. I'm always curious about them though. I often get excited when I happen across old meanings of words that have very precise connotations in present day. For instance, I think it's fascinating that the word virgin once simply meant an unmarried woman. It had nothing to do with a Hymen being intact as it now means. Virgins were often mothers, had partners as she chose (Hollywood virgins???) and may have been warriors.

Obviously, if a word challenges my vocabulary, then I'm curious enough to look it up. One word I recently looked up was 'polymath'. New one on me. It means a person of great learning in several fields of study. It is something or someone I would strive to be or emulate– like someone with a PhD about a number of subjects. I had instilled in me at an early age a hunger for knowledge, for information, for understanding– logical understanding. Trying to satisfy this hunger has taught me one significant thing. The more I learn, the more there is I realize I don’t know and might never be able to know. I guess that’s just the natural progression of things. My how things do change.