This morning, Sky News reporters said a hundred times if they said it once that the murderer’s identity can’t be revealed because he is under 18 and hence a child in the eyes of the law. And children must be protected from damaging publicity even if they can’t be protected from mass murderers.
Sky even refused to vouchsafe to its audience the snippets of information mentioned in the print media. These informed us that the murderer’s family comes from Rwanda, thus having travelled in the opposite direction to that advocated by the previous government. The family has “no known links to Islam”, and in fact the murderer’s father is “active in the local church”.
There, you Islamophobes you (on this evidence I’m part of that group), the moment you hear of a terrorist act you jump to the conclusion that the offender is Muslim. The fact that you (and I?) are usually right is no excuse, and I for one am suitably contrite. It’s Christianity that’s to blame for Southport, and trust you not to have figured that out for yourself.
Of course, even if it’s true that the father is a church-goer – and none of those snippets looked especially credible – that doesn’t necessarily mean the son can’t be a Muslim. Such things happen. For example, and I hope you’ll forgive a bit of solipsism, my religion is different from my father’s and my son’s (atheists, both of them).
Anyway, Sky circumspectly refused to jump the gun and only told us that the stabber is 17 and male. However, one reporter inadvertently let another important fact slip out, and I may be the only viewer who caught it.
So here’s that cat jumping out of the bag: the 17-year-old suffers from multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, as it’s known nowadays. I just hope the correspondent who accidentally spilled the beans won’t be reprimanded or sacked.
She probably didn’t even realise her careless mistake, but it was egregious by media standards. Having identified the murderer as a 17-year-old boy, the reporter then said that “they will be transported” to such and such facility later today.
Do you get it? I did. Obviously, the ‘boy’ has at least two personalities to go by, a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The plural personal pronoun might have also meant that the murderer had an accomplice, but that’s unlikely.
If my first guess is correct, then there’s the defence strategy mapped out. The defence counsel can claim that it was his client’s Mr Hyde personality that wielded that knife. The Dr Jekyll part, which is the real essence of his client, was unaware of the monstrous act perpetrated by his alter ego and hence can’t be held responsible for it.
Then, of course, there’s another possibility, and it fills me with dread. That reporter is a woke illiterate who refuses to use the masculine personal pronoun even in relation to someone whose male sex has already been established.
Now, you may think I’m making a cultural mountain out of a verbal molehill, but this sort of thing is a harbinger of a civilisational catastrophe. When language goes, everything goes. A glossocratic attack has our whole culture as its target.
I use – and might have even coined – the term ‘glossocratic’ because an attempt to control and dictate language for political ends is a naked power grab. As Orwell showed in his 1984, he who has the power to impose usage has the power to impose anything.
Our ruling elite is after self-perpetuation, and it’s prepared to sacrifice everything at the altar of that goal: taste, grammar, semantics, literacy and so on. Those who impose glossocracy don’t really care what words we use – they only care about their power to impose usage. It’s as if they are saying to us: “Yes, we know and you know that saying ‘they’ about one man is ugly and stupid – and we know that you know. But we can force you to do such things, and all you can do is shut up”.
That’s not to say that good old common-or-garden ignorance is alien to Sky News, and it doesn’t always have to be glossocratically motivated. Thus, later this morning, a presenter reading from the teleprompter spoke about the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
Though obligingly describing him as a “moderate” and “pragmatist” (everything is relative, I suppose), the newsreader then said that Haniyeh was “one of Israel’s most important counterparts”.
Thinking that either he or I had gone crazy, I went into the dictionary to check the meaning of ‘counterpart’. And sure enough, it was defined as “a person or thing that corresponds to or has the same function as another person or thing in a different place or situation.” It doesn’t mean ‘enemy’, ‘foe’, ‘opponent’ or ‘adversary’.
Let me see if I can backtrack to the root of that error. The prefix ‘counter-’ can mean not only ‘corresponding’ but also ‘opposed’. The late Mr Haniyeh, for all his moderation and pragmatism, was staunchly opposed to Israel. Therefore, decided whoever wrote that news report, he was Israel’s counterpart. An easy mistake to make – if one happens to be an ignoramus.
And speaking of ignoramuses, yet another reporter described a handshake between Haniyeh and Iran’s ayatollah as ‘fulsome’. That word doesn’t mean ‘wholehearted’ or ‘enthusiastic’. It means ‘insincerely effusive’, and contextually that’s not what the reporter had in mind.
At this point, you may think I’m a pedantic nit-picker, but let me assure you that I’ve never picked a nit in my life, nor have ever even seen one (has anyone?). The matter isn’t trivial. It’s as serious as a coffin lid closing.
The systematic destruction of English, whether undertaken out of institutional ignorance or for glossocratic reasons, spells a full frontal assault on our whole civilisation – I’d even go so far as to say it undermines the very essence of humanity.
God gave us the gift of language so that we may give shape to the output of our reason and consciousness. What we are doing is throwing that gift back into God’s face, and the deity punishes such slights severely.
Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, was how the Romans translated Sophocles who wrote, in Greek, that “Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason” – and hence of language.
We seem to have forgotten what the Greeks already knew 2,500 years ago. That’s a punishable transgression, and the penalty notice is on its way.
P.S. Sky presenters also mentioned approvingly that Home Secretary Angie is considering banning the EDL. This simple idea never crossed their mind: what’s sauce for the EDL goose should also be sauce for the Just Stop Oil gander. And there I was, thinking the spirit of fair play is still alive.
The whole world has become Humpty Dumpty (When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean…). I am in constant warfare against the infidels of language. It is maddening even for me, with my poor understanding of grammar (hurrah for our schools – even of 50 years ago!) and limited vocabulary. We all – children especially – mimic what we hear most often, so my family keep me on my toes, ever vigilant for such phrases as: “there’s too many” (“Use ‘are’ please, not ‘is’, for more than one”), “these ones” (“If possible, name the object, as in ‘these shoes’, or leave the noun implied”), “we have less students” (“We use ‘less’ when discussing things that are measured; we use ‘fewer’ with things that are counted”). But the modern world is winning. The constant influx of new atrocities is overwhelming. In the office there are new offensive phrases debuting every day. Every noun can also be used as a verb. I receive ‘invites’ instead of ‘invitations’ to meetings. The murder of ‘he’ and ‘she’ by ‘they’ is complete. The modern ear no longer registers the discordance.
My earliest memory of the modern assault on language was the realization some 40 years ago that few people knew the difference between biannual and semiannual. In 1976, these United States celebrated the bicentennial of their founding. I think every person in the nation understood that to mean “two hundred”, not “half hundred”. How quickly that was forgotten. The poor trio of insure, ensure, and assure have been forced by the press gang of modernity to be used interchangeably. Eventually we will have one word. It will mean everything. It will have fewer than four letters so as to make it easy to text. On the subject of texting, we seem to prefer to reduce the number of words we use while increasing the number of glyphs. I suppose it is possible for a rebirth of the language through the increased use of an increasing number of glyphs – maybe replacing our current alphabet.
“Those who impose glossocracy don’t really care what words we use – they only care about their power to impose usage.”
What you’re describing goes beyond even Orwell’s Newspeak. The purpose of Newspeak was to make Oldthink impossible, on the debatable assumption that without conservative words, conservative thought would be impossible. Thus “paederasty” (good Anglo-Greek) and “buggery” (good Anglo-French) have been replaced by “homosexuality” (an abominable mixture of Greek and Latin) because the abominable new word lacked the good old words’ connotations of abominable behaviour.
But now we have such distinctions as those between “coloured people” and “people of colour”, two terms which are philologically and semantically indistinguishable, but which nevertheless indicate the speaker to be either good or evil depending on which he (N.B. not “they”) chooses.
Glossocracy would be impossible without the previous triumph of Newspeak, but they’re not the same thing. Which of the two, I wonder, is doubleplusungooder?