In my checkered employment past, I once worked for a couple of weeks in the legal department of a large energy company. They had a coal electricity plant in a poorer section of town, and for years nearby residents had complained about damage to their property, primarily cars, from sediment that settled out of the air from the plant's pollution. Apparently the scrubbers weren’t working properly.
My job was little more than legal secretary, but I sat in on preparations for a major case. The lawyers were building their defense strategy with a massive whiteboard. To my horror, the centerpiece of their argument didn’t involve denying the damage or proving compliance. It was simply this: redefine “pollution” so that Kentucky’s statutes no longer applied. Problem solved.
That’s what I mean by word crimes. They are worse than semantic drift, worse than jargon, worse even than propaganda. Word crimes are when institutions, movements, or individuals deliberately steal a word from the language, hollow it out, and stuff it with a meaning that serves their agenda.
We see it everywhere today. A few obvious examples:
It’s important to distinguish these “word crimes” from political rhetoric. The right has, of course, coined terms — pro-life, tax relief, family values, Patriot Act, and others. But those are classic political branding: This tactic lives in the sphere of policy debate and has existed in every civilization since politics began. Moreover, those examples use new terms rather than redefining words that should belong to all of us. The Left’s redefinitions are something nastier. They take ordinary, everyday words and change their meanings so thoroughly that the rest of us can barely have a conversation without stepping into their framework. It isn’t new terminology. It’s a linguistic coup — sneaky, pervasive, and designed to win arguments not by persuasion, but by redefining reality itself.
Political rhetoric comes and goes. Slogans die with the campaign. But when everyday words get redefined, the damage lingers — because those words live in our homes, schools, workplaces, and laws. And once the new meanings are written down in the reference books and style guides we all rely on, the takeover becomes official.
That’s exactly what has happened. The very institutions meant to safeguard clarity in language have themselves been infiltrated:
When the arbiters of language become partisans, words stop being a shared resource and become weapons. And once the gatekeepers decide that only the redefined meanings are legitimate, dissenters are silenced not by argument, but by the dictionary.
When the arbiters of language — AP, Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia, and the rest — start modifying definitions to support leftist ideology, it’s not just wordplay. It’s almost like rewriting the base code of culture and civilization.
Language is the operating system of society. It’s how we describe reality, make laws, build trust, and pass wisdom from one generation to the next. But today we don’t just have corrupted code — we have conflicting code. Half of society means one thing by a word, and the other half means something completely different.
What happens to a computer when its code points in two directions at once? It crashes. It freezes. It becomes unstable, unpredictable, unusable. That’s exactly what happens to a culture when “equity,” “violence,” “woman,” or “democracy” carry mutually exclusive meanings depending on who’s speaking. The program of civilization begins to fail.
The corruption doesn’t just distort debates. It destabilizes reality. A civilization that can no longer name things truthfully can no longer think clearly. And a people who cannot think clearly cannot govern themselves.
Orwell warned of this in 1984 with his invented language, Newspeak. But Newspeak was built by replacing old words with new ones — destroying vocabulary so certain ideas couldn’t even be thought. What we face today is subtler and more deceptive. Instead of erasing words, our institutions keep the familiar ones — equity, violence, woman, democracy — and hollow them out, refilling them with alien meanings. Orwell imagined burning the library. In our real world, the library still stands, but many of the books have been replaced with forgeries.
The danger isn’t limited to culture. Laws themselves rest on words, and when those words are redefined, the meaning of the law changes without a single vote being cast.
Every statute, regulation, and contract is written in language. If the definition of “violence,” “discrimination,” or “marriage” can be altered by dictionaries, stylebooks, or activist judges, then the law itself mutates in real time. Citizens are no longer living under the law as written; they are living under the law as reinterpreted by shifting definitions.
It’s the equivalent of tampering with the source code of a computer program. Change one line, and the output changes everywhere. Imagine signing a contract where “interest” meant 5% when you signed, only to find six months later that the dictionary has redefined it to 15%. On paper, nothing changed. In reality, everything did.
That’s what word crimes do to law. They create a backdoor amendment process, one that bypasses legislatures and the people entirely. Instead of passing new laws openly, activists can change the ground rules by smuggling in new definitions. The law itself becomes unstable, because it no longer depends on what was passed, but on what the cultural gatekeepers decide the words now mean.
We already see this happening:
And here lies the constitutional danger. It is arguable that tampering with language in this way violates a fundamental civil right — the right to use words according to their plain, shared meaning — even if that right is not enumerated in the Constitution. Without stable language, free speech becomes a hollow guarantee. Without stable definitions, due process collapses, because no one can know what the law truly requires. Without stable words, equal protection falters, because definitions can be shifted to favor one group over another.
This is why word crimes matter. They don’t just corrode conversation — they corrode the rule of law itself, and in doing so, they erode rights so basic they were assumed to be self-evident.
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The worst part of word crimes is not the dishonesty of the perpetrator. It’s the acquiescence of the rest of us. When we allow our shared words to be stolen, we surrender common ground itself.
It starts with a word on a lawyer’s whiteboard. It ends with a society running two operating systems on the same machine. And as anyone who has ever used a computer knows, that never ends well.
But there’s still a remedy. Language only lives because people use it. Dictionaries and style guides may try to dictate, but words stay grounded when ordinary people keep speaking them truthfully. That means refusing to cede “equity” when you mean fairness, refusing to call speech “violence,” refusing to blur “woman” into abstraction. It means gently but firmly correcting misuse in conversation, teaching children the real definitions, and insisting that truth be spoken plainly in our homes, schools, and communities.
Each time we anchor a word back in reality, we repair a fragment of the code. Each time we refuse to bow to redefinition, we reclaim common ground. We may not be able to stop the gatekeepers from playing word games, but we can live as guardians of meaning in our own circles. And from those small acts of clarity, a culture can be restored.
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