The rise and rise of ‘word magic’

Belief in ‘word magic’ has been on display in abundance recently. This is the idea that words not only reflect the way we perceive reality, but also determine our view of it – and can therefore be manipulated in order to change reality itself.

This is the thinking that lies behind a new language guide by Network Rail, the company that maintains Britain’s railway infrastructure. Much of the coverage has focussed on plans to banish the word ‘passenger’ from its vocabulary. It considers the word too formal, and plans to address rail users instead as ‘you’. Also to be jettisoned are such encumbrances as ‘purchase’ and ‘obtain’. Most significantly, Network Rail recommends in its new 134-page manual, titled ‘Speaking Passenger’, that phrases like ‘expectant mother’ and ‘pregnant woman’ should also be consigned to obsolescence, to be replaced by ‘pregnant person’. Staff are similarly discouraged from using such terms as ‘boyfriend’, ‘wife’ or ‘husband’. They should instead use ‘partner’ or ‘spouse’, while ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are to be replaced by ‘parent’.

Network Rail protests that the initiative is motivated merely by the desire to ‘eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different people’. But we all know what is really afoot here, because we’ve seen it in action repeatedly over the past 10 years and more – most explicitly by those ideologues obsessed with personal pronouns. Such moves are undertaken by people who believe that if they can change language, they can change the real world. If you abolish words related to biological reality then, hey presto, that reality vanishes. ‘Now that’s word magic’, as Paul Daniels never put it.

This derives from a prior assumption that language creates our worldview in the first place, which a whole generation of humanities undergraduates were taught back in the 1990s. The future high priests of woke were told that reality consists of social constructs formulated and reified in discourses of oppression.

This notion goes back to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and was picked up by existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, who hugely influenced Michel Foucault and his postmodern acolytes, regarded words as tools and weapons to be marshalled and deployed to transform society. As Sartre wrote in What Is Literature?: ‘To speak is to act; anything which one names is already no longer quite the same; it has lost its innocence… Thus, by speaking, I reveal the situation by my very intentions of changing it; I reveal it to myself and others in order to change it.’

The myth that language is something possessed with sacred, mysterious and dangerous power persists to this day. Because devotees of word magic believe that language determines who we are, they conclude that it is our obligation to take this power back into our own hands, for our own ends.

This is why police in Hertfordshire have been told to refrain from uttering such sorcerous profanities as ‘black sheep’ or ‘blacklisted’, lest they summon the demon of racism. It is why the NHS now advises against describing patients as ‘obese’, ‘alcoholic’ or ‘smoker’, lest people be condemned to permanent ill-health by these semantic spells.

Abolish bad words and you banish bad things from the world. So goes this fantastical Orwellian thinking. What could possibly go wrong?

Where Orwell’s greatness came from

As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s death this year, it remains the case that he is regarded as a seer and a prophet, albeit a prophet of doom. After all, ‘Orwellian’ has long-established itself in the English language as a word warning us to the eternal spectre of totalitarianism, particularly through the manipulation of language. His two masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighteen-Four, are treated with great reverence. These secular bibles are quoted as if they were actually sacred texts.

Orwell was far from a saint in person, being rather prickly, doleful and selfish. But even taking into account his personal foibles, we are nonetheless still inclined to regard him with awe. This overlooks one important matter. He was not so much an inspired genius, but rather a flawed mortal, who achieved greatness by working relentlessly and ceaselessly.

His sheer industriousness survives in the thousands of articles and book reviews he wrote on myriad subjects, high- and low-brow, based on his restless observations of life, and his voracious and boundless love of literature. This comes out most strongly in his recollections of slumming it in Down and Out in Paris and London, in his conscientious reportage in The Road to Wigan Pier and in his participation in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled in Homage to Catalonia. This was an experience that opened his eyes to the gruesome manner in which words can be deliberately falsified in the name of ideology and ‘good motives’.

One of the remarkable, albeit incidental, things we learn from Homage to Catalonia is how the earnest wordsmith spent some of that campaign in Spain reading detective stories. With even more dissonance, he was obsessed with the works of James Joyce. As Orwell wrote in a letter in 1933: ‘I have read nothing except over and over again my dear Ulysses.’ This is remarkable, given that Orwell is lauded for the simplicity and austerity of his prose, a style he himself recommended with vehemence. Yet it took an open and persevering mind such as Orwell’s to plough through, devour and come to adore Joyce, that master of opacity and obfuscation.

Orwell reminds us that liberation of thought comes through persistence, by forever expanding one’s horizons, constantly reading and reflecting. He recognised the unstable, shifting yet vital connection that words had to reality. He also recognised the wrong enacted by those who sought to distort and pervert the precious link between the two.

Are we all ‘far right’ now?

On his GB News show on Sunday, Michael Portillo told viewers that his BBC television series, Great British Railway Journeys, was singled out by Prevent, the UK government’s counter-extremism programme. Indeed, Prevent case workers seemed to think that Portillo’s travelogues were capable of ‘encouraging far-right sympathies’.

Although it’s not a new story (as a Sun report at the time disclosed, other cultural habits deemed potentially ‘far right’ included watching Yes, Minister, House of Cards, The Dam Busters and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and even reading Shakespeare), it is worth revisiting, because it reminds us of the evasion and cowardice at the heart of the British state’s approach to extremism. Only last week, a leaked internal Home Office review on extremism suggested that claims of ‘two-tier policing’ are a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’.

The term ‘far right’ is bandied around so much it has come to be totally meaningless. Orwell himself would recognise how it has become a weaponised misnomer.

Still, it should not surprise us that hyper-progressive state functionaries should view a show such as Great British Railway Journeys with disdain. After all, it appeals to notions of history, place, tradition, community and nation. These are precisely the values that our shallow ruling class of Anywheres views with utter contempt.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.