“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

–William Butler Yeats

I’m an anarchist. I’m supposed to be opposed to authority; but really, the commitment only requires me to oppose the State, because it is coercive.

What of the authority of words then? It’s been pointed out to me that unlike the French I owe no allegiance to a government bureau that decides “Le Car” is a bastardization of their language, or forbids the naming of children unless the name appears on an officially sanctioned list.

I opened this comment with a quotation from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” but I just as easily could have begun with a quote from Lewis Carroll: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

And we are behind the looking glass, my friends. When no common agreement can be reached on what a word means, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world — and I don’t mean anarchism, which is a self-organizing system seeking a natural order. I mean the inability to communicate through language because words have no fixed meaning thus there is no longer the possibility of reasoned discussion, only of spin and propaganda.

This comment comes about because I objected to usage of the English word “marriage” — which has a customary meaning of a union between men and women (requiring at least one of each) for the purposes of sexual congress and procreation — being revised to include same-sex unions which, without bringing in a third party of the opposite sex — are incapable of either sexual congress or procreation.

I have called that the fiat inflation of language akin to the fiat inflation of warehouse receipts for commodity money. I’ve also called it counterfeiting a word. I also quoted Ayn Rand and called it a “stolen concept.”

And I have been challenged: Where do you — anarchist J. Neil Schulman — get off telling me how I can use a word?

How indeed? Who decides what a word means? The editors and publishers of dictionaries? People with pieces of paper stating that they’ve completed the requirements of something that has the gall to claim itself as an institute of “higher learning?” Any writer who can get paid a penny a word or more to write?

Or just anyone?

As I said, with no agreement, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world and we’re behind the looking glass.

It’s not just the question of whether same-sex couples can demand that I use the term “marriage” in referring to their partnering.

I’m asked by the former Vice President of the United States to regard drowning a hogtied prisoner not as “torture” but as “enhanced interrogation.”

My answer to this is already on record. If drowning a prisoner is “enhanced” interrogation then rape is “enhanced” dating and a firing squad is “enhanced” target practice.

But who am I to tell the former Vice President of the United States that his use of language is wrong?

Then there are the doctors of philosophy and medicine who write articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association who say that bullets are from now on to be referred to as “pathogens” — just like bacteria and virusus — and defined as such the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be given the authority to quarantine them.

Or, similarly, that the tobacco plant can be redefined as a drug and cigarettes redefined as a drug delivery device, and therefore the Federal Food and Drug Administration can require you to get a prescription from a doctor before you smoke one — and good luck with that.

But where does this anarchist get off telling the fine minds at the NEJM, JAMA, CDC, and FDA how they can define words?

When it became inconvenient for organized criminals who owned banks to steal our gold they replaced the meaning of the word “money” so it no longer meant gold but meant engraved paper … and later just symbols on a computer display.

When war became unpopular they stopped calling it war and started calling it “police actions.”

When trials became inconvenient to decide if someone suspected of conspiring to commit terrorist acts was either a prisoner of war or a criminally accused, they did away with such inconvenient truths and “enemy combatants” were created out of thin air.

Do you start to get an inkling of the problem? If we abandon the customary usages of words and let anybody come along and create new definitions any time it suits their purpose, we lose our history, our customs, our ability to argue against any aggressive linguistic virus that is spread by those who wish to infect us with their own toxic usages.

This is one anarchist who’s going to be a curmudgeon about it and say, “Not with MY words, you don’t.”

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J. Neil Schulman is the author of Alongside Night, among other classic libertarian novels, stories and screenplays.