Too much heat can destroy things. The same is true of political heat. It wreaks havoc on the language. For instance, take the word “old”, like walls being “old technology”.
I was thinking this morning of the amazing things that we are doing with technology. I bluetoothed my phone with my bedroom radio/receiver for the umpteenth time to listen to Pandora. It’s wonderful to know that we have crammed so much capability in a cellphone smaller than a chest-pocket notepad. In the end, though, the cellphone functions as a radio of days of yore. All the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are just radio signals. It’s “old” in today’s corrupted parlance.
Radio and its signals weren’t understood until a nerdy and inventive kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, figured out how it worked and came up with the components in the 1910’s-1930’s to make AM and FM radio, and television for that matter, possible. Apple and Android are riding on his back.
The cellphone has a lot more of “old” in it. Thanks to the gang at Bell Labs and Robert Noyce and his band of lusty fellows at Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1950’s and 1960’s we have the semiconductor and planar process. Without these things, no cellphone … and our kids would be normal.
“Old” is all around us. It seems foolish to call them “old” because they are as fundamental as gravity. It sounds jarring to speak of gravity as “old”. Newton and Einstein didn’t invent gravity. They attempted to understand it. Armstrong didn’t invent the EM spectrum. He just found a way to use it. Bell Labs and Robert Noyce didn’t invent silicon or electricity. They just found ways to use it for sending electrical signals (the integrated circuit).
“Old” is everywhere. If it wasn’t for another “old” process, we wouldn’t be here … if we escaped the clutches of Planned Parenthood and our parents ignored the loony congresswoman from the Bronx (AOC).
“Old” is one of those words facing disfigurement by our partisan hotheads. Trump wants a wall; the Dems want power. Power to do what? Power to remake America. “Old” is attached to “walls” to frustrate efforts to limit and manage the human tide crashing our borders. Walls do work; ask any celebrity seeking privacy. The Dems, in their heart of hearts, don’t want anything that really works. That’s because they are predisposed to be more comfortable with open borders than they are with controlled borders.
Of course, the Dems need an alternative or surrender the field. Their favorite rejoinder is to attach “more” and “new” to “technology” and “more” to “personnel”. Sounds great, and is. The only problem is that the other side has long wanted this stuff … and walls.
The gambit of only “new technology” and “more personnel”, though, serves the Dems’ interests in two ways. First, the tech stuff can be easily turned off and the personnel moved away from the border if the political winds should blow their way. Secondly, it’s a hot opportunity to funnel some taxpayer cash to their rich donors in Silicon Valley. Construction companies and their workers building a wall aren’t likely to be a rich source of support anyway.
Sometimes such words are combined with others to produce nonsense, as in “diversity” combined with “is our strength”. What football team achieved BCS ranking by allowing the offensive line to be “diverse” in their blocking? It’s balderdash.
Bastardize is defined as “change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements”. “Old” and “diversity” have been bastardized beyond recognition. Simply by affixing “old” to anything has convinced the Dems that they have won the argument. No, they’re just playing fast and loose with the language. Now there’s a scandal, a linguistic one with disastrous consequences.
RogerG