{"id":224,"date":"2026-05-31T04:39:43","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T04:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=224"},"modified":"2026-05-31T04:39:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T04:39:43","slug":"when-words-lose-their-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=224","title":{"rendered":"When Words Lose Their Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cWhen I use a word,\u201d Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, \u201cit means just what I choose it to mean \u2014 neither more nor less.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Read more Is Killing Innocents Christian?<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe question is,\u201d said Alice, \u201cwhether you can make words mean so many different things.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cThe question is,\u201d said Humpty Dumpty, \u201cwho is to be master \u2014 that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

I was glad to have this snippet from <\/span>Alice<\/span><\/i> show up on my screen recently. The inversion of words to mean their exact opposite is meant to show who is master, not to open a conversation. Anyone who wishes to use words for sharing meaning, as we humans do to live well together and thrive, is left spluttering. The rules of the game have been broken; no meeting of the minds is intended, only victory at any expense.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The natural reaction is to withdraw. Humpty Dumpty then wins this little game, and you stop playing it. Reasonable enough. Let him play his stupid game and win its stupid prize. But after being on the losing end of such a skewed confrontation you choose not to cede the language to enemies of speech, your first reaction might be to brand Humpty Dumpty\u2019s aggressive language \u201cOrwellian.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Orwell knew that horror and wrote of it with startling, unflinching clarity. What Alice provides beyond that is imaginative freedom.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

As it certainly is!<\/span><\/p>\n

But by now, there is little cut and bite to that label, as precise and apt as it is. Perhaps it is inevitable when a book becomes assigned reading in school, as Orwell\u2019s books have been. In my high school, Alice was not assigned. She showed up listening to Jefferson Airplane\u2019s <\/span>White Rabbit, <\/span><\/i>with Jack Casady\u2019s Ravel-inspired bass line setting the tone. Edgy, biting, precisely nailing the spirit of the times. <\/span>Alice<\/span><\/i> can still do that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alice\u2019<\/span><\/i>s author was an edgy and precise man. Charles Dodgson was a mathematician who taught at Oxford and made contributions to symbolic logic and algebra; he was also a skilled photographer, an inventor, and a churchman. Elements of all these came together in his <\/span>Alice<\/span><\/i> books. There, his imagination is sustained, dizzyingly precise in its realization, and psychologically apt in its portrayal of how absurd and dangerous the world can be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, kids like this. As Jerry Garcia put it, talking about the old American songs for kids he recorded in the early Nineties, \u201cKids know the world is full of weird stuff.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When words have no intrinsic meaning any more, things do get very weird.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In my childhood, I was fascinated with politics. I got the idea that it works best when guided by the ideals of the Founding, that we are all created equal by the Creator in His image and that we are meant to be free. The great moral issue of my youth was Jim Crow, for its blatant denial of all I thought America stood for.\u00a0 Racism was a foul thing, whether at home or abroad. That little kids like me in Little Rock needed soldiers to protect them just to go to school was hard to grasp and seemed all wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I learned about that, I slowly learned the history of what happened in Europe in bits and pieces. I remember the tattooed numbers on the bare forearm of Jack the tailor, his sleeves rolled up on a steamy summer day in 1950s New Jersey. I remember sitting in the dark movie theater in downtown Trenton with my father, watching <\/span>Judgment at Nuremberg <\/span><\/i>on its it first run and trembling inside when, during the scene when the prosecution was projecting movies of what the Allies found in the concentration camps, I saw the tears streaming down my father\u2019s face. The horror that the word \u201cNazi\u201d conveyed was the result of direct experience of thousands of Gis and the shared reality of the drips and drabs of stories told by or about people singed or consumed by the horror.<\/span><\/p>\n

What do the words \u201cracist,\u201d \u201cfascist,\u201d or \u201cNazi\u201d convey today? How about \u201cgenocide\u201d? What does it mean to our humanity when those words are warped to serve the ends of those whose horrors these words once conveyed?<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more A Party of Weak Men and Strong Women<\/a><\/p>\n

First among the many meanings is that it diminishes our humanity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To keep our humanity whole, we need more than ever the centuries-long perspective of our civilization. Here is a most important thread from that great tapestry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The medieval Jewish philosophers shared with the rest of Western civilization the four-part categorization of the beings of this world: in ascending order, inanimate, vegetable, animal, and human. However, in Hebrew, the lowest of these four rungs was called \u201csilent\u201d and the highest rung \u201cspeaker.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The language flows from the ancient language of Genesis and the content of its narrative, the story that sets the civilization on its foundations, and on which everything else flowing from the Bible depends.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Genesis story, the world is created by speech. The Rabbis of old counted 10 distinct divine utterances in the creation story and connect them to the 10 Words (better known in English as the 10 Commandments) of Sinai. The words of law can lead us to internalize the order of the universe and the wisdom and purpose infused in its order. It can do so because we and the universe are made and sustained by those words, the words of speech calling it continuously into being out of <\/span>tohu vavohu \u2014 <\/span><\/i>incoherence and chaos. God speaks and brings the world into being, and we are told that we can be creators within His creation.<\/span><\/p>\n

But like Adam and Eve in the Garden, we often use words to hide the truth.\u00a0 We imagine that we are the master, able even to outsmart God. But all we do is destroy what makes us most human.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Using words in harmony with the divine speech that forms us builds the spiritual, intellectual, and material treasures of civilization. But words abused destroy our own coherence and that of the civilization whose stewards we are.<\/span><\/p>\n

When speech is turned on its head\u2014when words mean whatever those in power declare them to mean, in true Humpty Dumpty fashion \u2014 it shatters our shared understanding of reality. We no longer possess a common story. Instead, we find ourselves in Hobbes\u2019s nightmare of bellum omnium contra omnes<\/em>, the war of all against all, or in an even darker nightmare: a world ruled by devotees of the Big Lie, who seek to silence anyone beyond their control, whether through intimidation, terror, or ultimately extermination.<\/p>\n

Orwell knew that horror and wrote of it with startling, unflinching clarity. What<\/span> Alice<\/span><\/i> provides beyond that is imaginative freedom. It is not tied as deeply to knowledge of a specific time. It is more fundamental, going deep into our consciousness, where even children know how weird and dangerous we can be. We all feel how much we need Alice\u2019s courage and common sense not to give in to the Humpty Dumpty or the Red Queen waiting to emerge from the abyss once we despair of the meaning of the words we speak and the story we tell.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alice<\/span><\/i> cuts through the insanity because it not only diagnoses what we face, but it also shows us the kind of courage we all need to keep our world from going mad.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more The Old Man and the Sea<\/a><\/p>\n

Cherish the meaning of our words and stories. Don\u2019t let them go.<\/span><\/p>\n

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Stories That Saved the West<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tale First, Facts Later<\/strong><\/p>\n

Power, Islamism, and the Crisis of Western Rationality<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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