Lost Words

In their philistinism MAGA has inadvertently created a glossary for resistance and rebuilding the world they are destroying.

In October 2017 the writer Robert McFarlane and the artist Jackie Morris produced ‘Lost Words’ - a ‘book of spells’ to conjure back into existence the words lost through under-use and our increasing separation from the natural world. The book began as a response to the removal of everyday nature words - among them "acorn", "bluebell", "kingfisher" and "wren" - from a widely used children’s dictionary, because those words were not being used enough by children to merit inclusion. Others included: adder, ash, beech, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. But The Lost Words grew to become a much broader protest at the loss of the natural world and the removal of the concepts that go with it.

Last week reporters at The New York Times pored through 5,000 pages from various federal agencies and found that the following words had been removed from government websites and publications. I loved the idea that ideas and concepts that Trump World found difficult could just be erased. It’s more subtle than kidnapping protestors such as Mahmoud Khalil, but also more insidious.

This culturally responsive act is an attack on diversity and inclusion but also an attempt to erase from the language key concepts. Included in the list are “black and latinx”, “gender”, “disability”, “indigenous community”, “hispanic minority”, “female” and “climate crisis”.

“Climate science” is also deleted. Damn those experts, begone.

The Trump word list acts as a sort of template for a world to be defended.

The list of targeted words includes phrases such as “diversity”, “equity”, “systemic” and “sense of belonging”. Even seemingly neutral terms like “institutional” and “women” have been marked for deletion.

I like the ‘A’s’ - accessible; activism; activists; advocacy; advocate; affirming care; all-inclusive; allyship; anti-racism; anti-racist.

MAGA, in its stupidity and simplicity are guiding us. Through the madness and the carnage and the sense of being in constant crisis, it’s difficult to see a way through. This is it, this is the template to everything that needs defended, upheld and amplified.

The ‘C’s’ include: community diversity; community equity; cultural differences; cultural heritage.

If Macfarlane and Morris’s book emphasised the cultural consequences of monoculture and the deep connections between ecosystem loss and language loss, it’s not surprising that MAGA loves simplicity and hates complexity. The government is reduced to the dictats of one man, America is reduced to a single cultural identity, the role of women is reduced to a single purpose (reproduction), and the economic system is reduced to a single function (production).

This is the worldview that demands that these words be deleted: diverse backgrounds; diverse communities; diverse community; diverse group; diverse groups; diversified; diversify; diversifying; diversity and inclusion; diversity equity.

Equality; equitable; equity and fostering inclusivity are obviously out, and so make it into our mirror-dictionary.

F-G is fun. The words to be banned include: female; fostering inclusivity; gender; gender diversity; genders; hate speech; excluded.

I think we can say that the idea of banning “excluded” has a direct relationship to the banning of the idea of “sense of belonging”. Inclusion, inclusive, inclusiveness and inclusivity are also, obviously, er, included.

Of course what they are attempting is stupid and useless and unworkable, or to use another banned word: “political”. But as part of their wide sweep to re-make the world in their image and to reduce and destroy, it is disturbing. It is a strangely clumsy effort to marginalize minorities (both banned) but also a starkly dystopian task.

The counter to it would be to not only re-insert the words and concepts into everyday discourse but to act on them, enact them, become them.

A Peat Glossary

Language loss and monoculture (in this case white European Christian) go hand in hand, but so too is the perversity of the omnicide that lies at the heart of much of Trump’s mission. This goes back to Dreamland and Greenland, Trump’s New Manifest Destiny and “Drill, Baby Drill”. Thinking you can have perpetual growth on a finite planet, believing that you stand completely outside nature and that permanent extractivism is compatible with civilization is an obvious absurdity, but it goes hand in glove with the desecration of language. This is ‘systemic trauma’ (both also banned).

The antidote to this hellscape is the defence of language, minority language, and gorging ourselves on the complexity and nuance of life and the natural world. The often unrecognised backstory to Robert Macfarlane’s work which led to Lost Words is the collection “Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary” (a “counter-desecration phrasebook”) compiled by Finlay Macleod with Anne Campbell, Catriona Campbell and Donald Morrison.

In its richness and deep connection this is the antithesis of Trumpist language desecration. The collaboration between Macleod and Macfarlane resulted in an online phenomenon of the ‘Word of the Day’, my favourite being: “èit” – “the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so they sparkle in moonlight & thereby attract salmon to them in late summer & autumn” (Gaelic, esp. the Isle of Lewis).

Others include caochan a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation feith – a watercourse running through peat, the form of which resembles veins or sinews; bugha – a green, bow-shaped area of moor grass formed by the winding of a stream; and rionnach maoim – shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day.

These words and this language are under threat and in peril from the deeper forces that are beloved by the Trump regime. But they are mentioned here just to glance at the mirror being held up here between Macleod and Trump - both sons of Lewis - now separated by a distance, one that held ideas that would value and cherish the world and one that holds values that are destroying it.

Under Valued

It’s worth noting that “historically” is on the banned list.

Much of this madness is aimed at what Trump and his movement deem “woke”, what we used to refer to as “political correctness”. This war on language is not new. But some of it is a guilty giveaway. Take the inclusion (banned) of ‘institutional’ in this list:

• implicit bias

• implicit biases

• inclusion

• inclusive

• inclusiveness

• inclusivity

• increase diversity

• increase the diversity

• indigenous community

• inequalities

• inequality

• inequitable

• inequities

• institutional

Of course lgbt is banned - as is ‘sexual preferences’ and ‘social justice’.

Also banned are marginalize; marginalized; minorities; minority and multicultural.

This is a concerted effort at polarization that comes from political prejudice and privilege (all banned).

Of course racism is at the beating heart of Trumpism, and the underlying concept of colonialism that formed America, and so, race and ethnicity; racial; racial diversity; racial inequality; racial justice; racially and racism are all deleted.

The removal of ‘sociocultural’ and ‘socioeconomic’ is interesting as it speaks to the populist right’s rage against institutions, universities and the very idea of knowledge based systems and ‘institutions’ (banned).

As Eric Merkeley and Peter Loewen have observed (Anti-intellectualism and the mass public’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic): “Some groups of citizens, such as ideological conservatives, populists, religious fundamentalists and the like, may see experts as threatening to their social identities.”

If the MAGA phenomenon is a belief system it is untouchable by rational discourse. But you can create and conjure an alternate from their blueprint. We do not need to be the victim (also banned).

The concepts and the words that they have inadvertently highlighted to us are systemically: under appreciated; under represented; under served and undervalued (all banned). In this we need to thank Donald Trump and his team for offering this as a focus.

What we need is a “counter-desecration phrasebook” and now we know all of the chapter headings.

Image credit: Jackie Morris