For months I haven't been able to keep from thinking about the recurring situation of being at the supper table when some kid of the family is tapping, annoying everyone. His mother tells him to stop tapping. His answer is that he's NOT tapping. He's rapping or knocking or . . . something. He has discovered semantics.
Today's arguments about whether there is an impeachment hearing, an impeachment investigation, or not anything to do with impeachment is the same. But it's also turning out that the disadvantage of a written rule of law is that it's in words, written down, and that can affect the outcome of any trial. So Mueller says as little as possible. If the choice of words is not exact and specific, clever money-motivated lawyers working in squads can find loopholes. If that doesn't work, moving the context is often effective. Gun control in 1776 is nothing like gun control in 2019.
Another escape is using the acronyms for long phrases that people have forgotten, so that one lady was startled to realize that the AR17 she wanted to buy was an Assault Rifle. Or one can use a foreign language. Kid jargon IS a foreign language and one must depend on context to know whether "stan" means "country" as in the case of Afghanistan or means having a strong positive love for something or somebody. Originally it was a conflation of "stalker" and "fan" and referred to obsession with a celebrity. Now people say "I stan ice cream."
Conflation is a likely source of new words, but parts of England are famous for using metaphor or even rhyme. Check out Cockney slang on Google. "Apples and Pears" means incllnes and stairs, because that's how the fruits at the store are arranged in rows.
Misspelling as a means of evasion -- using numbers in place of letters -- is popular for passwords, although many have figured that out. The computer itself demands accurate spelling except that some programs will suggest the right spelling. Sometimes the "helpful" spelling checks are pretty funny. The counter force is shortening words by amputation, so that only the beginning is there. This works for familiar material -- sorta. I'd say "et cetera" except everyone spells it wrong: ect instead of etc.
But spelling is only one difficulty, partly created by ignorance and partly by the underlying idea that there is only one "proper" way of spelling a specific word and that it is a moral fault to get it wrong. This pre-determination hegemony seeps over into many other functions of our lives. It's a double-edged mischief maker. On the one hand the "proper" way of bookkeeping may be rigid, but it prevents confusion. On the other hand, the idea that laws can only be enforced by incarceration or even the death sentence, is often unjust and doesn't work. It closes out other options, including rewriting the laws on reconsideration of reality.
But lately I see even more problems. An academic said to me, "I just can't do my job. I can't get my head around how to make it work." They were running a humanities program at a small young college where there were no established precedents and only a vague idea of what humanities actually are, and why anyone would not stick to math and science. More sophisticated people might point out that science is increasingly rethinking what has always been assumed.
More seriously, the Town of Browning, which was defined and supported by the State of Montana but interfered with by the tribe and the feds, was dissolved by the state. Except for some powers that had been delegated and couldn't be dissolved, like the public schools and some child and family services. Worse, Glacier County, which includes the reservation -- though some people think that a reservation should be counted as a county by itself -- is so in debt that there is thought of dissolving the county. These may just be positive moves towards resolving the jurisdictional snafus for many governing functions. New thought is vital.
On another universal front, people are very confused about how love and marriage work. It used to be that the church and the state controlled all that stuff, because it was about ownership and responsibility. You were issued paper: a wedding certificate, a birth certificate, a death certificate, a passport. Of course, birth and death are perfectly obvious, or so we thought until someone started picking up brain waves from supposedly dead people and some people thought that a fetus with a heartbeat was alive even before they had a brain. The wedding certificate, as horny young men about to go off to war have been saying for centuries, is only a piece of paper. DNA is what counts now.
But the passport is more problematic than ever. The organizations that were supposed to protect us -- Homeland Security and ICE -- have turned into monster thugs, grabbing school girl citizens off the street and letting babies die in refrigerated rooms packed with prisoners. They ignore paper. If we can dissolve towns and counties, surely we can dissolve these renegade enemy-within organizations.
Even putting aside the treason and criminal actions of Trump, he has never understood what his job is. He runs it as though it were Mafia, right up to the point of death -- certainly he throws people out right and left. And this is where the media is blind: they can think only in terms of binary cage-fighting, never mind the blood and damage. Go for the spectacle. But maybe it's not the reporters, who are out there looking at real life all day, who are at fault, but it's the owners and editors who twist facts into their cynical notion of what will sell.
They say that the two best natural mechanics are Navajo or Inuit, even if they are working on combustion engines. This is because of several practices their cultures teach. First, of course, not to lose one's temper. (They must be appalled by Trump's red-faced tantrums.) Second, keep all the parts safe and clean. Third, always think about how it all fits together. These are the qualities that make a good hunter, a good leader, a good partner, a good parent. Jesus smiles. It's not the language -- it's the thinking behind the language.
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