Language and reality have a beautiful connection with each other. Each is to a degree we often fail to recognize deeply informed by its mirror image. By changing the definition of a word, or attaching a new phrase to an idea, both reality and language change in subtle, often unexpected ways. Euphemistic Pooling is the idea that you can connect concepts with different normative values in an effort to construct a meaning that is more acceptable to yourself or your group. This is often political(in the sense of referring to the polis or society) but it is something we all do as part of our efforts to communicate and shape the world we live in. It cannot be abolished but it should be appreciated.
A couple of months ago I was reading an article by Matt Yglesias titled “Obama mostly got things right” on his substack Slow and Boring. One part in particular jumped out. Namely, he begins the article by observing the lack of a word to describe the political movement most commonly referred to as “wokism” and bemoans its effect on the clarity of public discourse. “The lack of agreed-upon labels makes it hard to talk in a clear way about recent events in American politics.” This began a series of thoughts that have resulted in this essay. In particular, I’ve been grappling with the question of how much words actually matter. Specifically, when we change words do we succeed in changing the deeper concept as well? Or instead, as Stephen Pinker hypothesized in a 1994 op-ed for the New York Times titled “The Game of Names” the concepts are immune to manipulation. In his own words “The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name and the name became colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name.”
This is an intuitive idea that is common among many people I deeply respect. For example, David Foster Wallace argued a similar perspective in his essay “Authority and American Usage” where he is quoted as saying “As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as “economically disadvantaged "rather than “poor”.
The problem is I just don’t buy this hypothesis. As someone who is still relatively young (26), I’ve seen and experienced the effect that language has on politics. In fact, I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that words influence society and our perception of reality in fundamental ways. Even within my own life I subtly redefine words and relationships in an effort to better communicate my beliefs or shape the opinions of others. The idea of people changing language to reflect their preferences is terrifying for many and rightfully so. Authors like George Orwell aptly articulate why it should be avoided and the negative consequences on the clarity of the English language. But it simply cannot be gotten rid of. It is fundamental to how we use language and like all tools can be used for good and evil. So much so that when I shared an earlier version of this essay with a close friend his response was “Are you just describing rhetoric?” In a sense, yes. But I’m doing more than that as well. I’m proposing a Contra-Copernican understanding of words where neither reality nor language is central but instead, each informs the other like mirrors reflecting eternity.
Adjectives and their Adjacents
Consider the term conservative. To many people across the world, the term conservative is a pejorative. However, in the West, it is a term with relative symbolic clarity. When a politician calls themselves a conservative I know with rough accuracy what they are referring to. Even when it is used as an insult for example by a socialist magazine like the Jacobin, I know what they are referring to without having to engage with the idiosyncratic tastes of the author. In the West to be a conservative is to be an ethnic identitarian of the majority group - with varying degrees of openness - pro-capitalist, and skeptical of the effectiveness of the state of reordering social relations. How you feel about these positions can change how you might use the term but the simple fact remains that many Americans enthusiastically identify themselves with these policies.
Beyond the contentious domain of politics, we have adjectives for almost every descriptor we can think of. I can call someone “tall”, “poor”, “ugly”, or “strong” and in a single word express an entire basket of ideas. Words like this are essential because without them language would be unduly cumbersome. In fact, the ability of humans to compress an entire basket of relational concepts into discrete words is one of our most remarkable skills.
Since there are ideas to which we assign negative normative value such as being unintelligent, sloppy, or violent, words that we associate with these ideas take on their meaning and become a proxy for them.
For an example of this look no further than the word retarded which has its origins according to an article by the Special Olympics in 1961. The term was originally used - although it existed prior to this - as a replacement for the previous batch of words to describe unintelligent or otherwise mentally disabled people such as imbecile or moron. Since no one likes being thought of as unintelligent, even the mentally retarded, let alone their parents and advocates, as the term gained wider usage it took on its ~true~ normative meaning and became pejorative. This is unavoidable. Whatever term, phrase, hand gesture, or spell you use to reference a person who is retarded will with enough time take on the normative value we assign to that idea. I rode the short bus - another term rich with implied meaning - in middle school so trust me I know having my identity - dyslexic - used as a pejorative isn’t fun. But this phenomenon is simply true.
I hope that intuitively everything makes sense so far. However, understanding this dynamic in human language is essential to understanding human nature, especially in the modern world. Since it appears that to humans - as well as LLMs - words can be best understood as a vector describing their relationship with other words but with no direct meaning, rather than words - in particular abstract words - pointing to something in physical reality; instead they take on the meaning of their context. For example, there is nothing normatively good or bad about a term like tall. Instead, the context in which the word is used defines its normative value. Since being tall is viewed as on average an attractive trait for men to have by most women, and (most) men want to be viewed as attractive by most women, the term tall becomes a proxy for “good”. Or at least the vector for “tall” is more similar to the vector “good” than its opposite “short”.
Thus, there is a natural tension between the necessity to refer to a real phenomenon and a feeling of otherness created by the true way we feel about these concepts. Our solution to this is to be in a constant state of reinvention. As the level of social sensitivity has increased, the half-life of words has fallen as well. The result of this is a general decline in the clarity of words that refer to important - but sensitive - topics. For example, how should I in an academic or professional setting refer to the developing world? Or the homeless? Or a person who is lower class? None of these are unimportant ideas where a loss in clarity is meaningless.
There are, of course, reasons in which replacing a word is useful for clarity's sake. Think of Indian which before only a few decades ago could refer to either inhabitants of Indic civilization or Native Americans. While the population of Indians (from India) in America was small this was fine, but with increasing globalization it is simply a recipe for mass confusion. Overwhelmingly this is the exception and not the rule. With few exceptions, words change not to increase clarity but instead to reduce it, to substitute a sensitive idea with strategic ambiguity. Thus, usually, the goal of changing language is to muddy the waters around a topic in which our clear social feelings are otherwise uncomfortable. The transition from Moron -> Retard -> Mentally Handicapped -> Differently Abled was not done because any of the prior terms failed to accurately communicate the meaning we wanted but because they were too good of proxies for the underlying concept.
None of what I’ve said so far is original. The idea of replacing old words with new fresh words is commonly referred to as the “Euphemistic Treadmill”. What I’m going to articulate next - to the best of my knowledge - is that what’s amazing about this conceptualization of language is the degree to which this effect works both ways. Contrary to the perspective Steven Pinker presents where the concepts of color without themselves being affected, the reality is much more complicated. Given words are defined relationally, when one shifts a single word it moves the whole network with it. Imagine pulling the Earth with a huge cable, the Moon and satellites would follow it. Even huge objects like the Sun would be pulled slightly along as if by a huge net. By moving one object the whole celestial dance changes, for some objects subtly and for others significantly. I refer to the idea that changes to language don’t just obscure our relationship with a concept but change it as Euphemistic Pooling.
Euphemistic Pooling
In political life, you can see this bidirectional effect happening constantly. As more and more conservatives attempted to tie socialism to broadly popular policies in the mid-2000s like health care reform and raising the minimum wage, socialism as a concept became less cleanly associated with the crimes of the USSR or state ownership of the means of production. To the point that now, when someone calls themselves a socialist (or even a Marxist), rarely do they mean they believe in the labor theory of value but instead they are communicating their support for center-left policies like universal health care. The rise of figures like Bernie Sanders should highlight the degree to which tying the term socialism to broadly popular policies resulted in changing the preferences of Americans on a whole basket of policies. As you can see the effect worked both ways. Socialism as a concept and as a word were altered by their use.
There is a warning buried in here as well. Conservative politicians clearly wanted to degrade support for the Obama administration by referring to it as socialist. No doubt it had a material effect on his polls given the low support for socialism at the time. But the long-run effect has been to transform the words and not Obama. Looking at Google ngrams the term socialism in English began to reverse a half-century of decline in 2010.
You can see left-wing activists repeating this behavior in real time every day. Since the vast majority of Americans have an intuitive aversion - despite what people say - to fascism there is a tendency in the online left to try and bunch the opposition together with them. This has led to many articles referring to the policies of Javier Millei in Argentina as fascist. This isn’t because his policies of economic deregulation have anything in common with those of Mussolini’s Italy who clearly articulated himself in “The Doctrine of Facism”. Notably describing his ideology as “Anti-individualistic” where “the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State''. But instead, activists know that tying his programs of economic deregulation to fascism will change the perception of the concept itself.
If Millei succeeds though, you risk permanently fusing the ideas of free market capitalism - which is widely popular - with the totalitarian genocidal ideology of fascism. Even if he fails, simply by associating the two ideas you permanently affect them both.
As a third example, consider Trump on Truth Social where he showed a word cloud that represented the words associated with him based on a poll. Centrally in the word cloud was the word “dictatorship”. Throughout the center-left and far-left press, there was a general sense of smug confusion. The overwhelming sense from sites like Twitter (X) or articles published about the post was something to the effect of “look at these dumb Trump supporters. They support Trump's call for a dictatorship” or even “Trump supporters want a dictatorship”. The problem is that they haven’t realized this is a direct result of their own actions. Since for nearly the last decade the media has been referring to Trump’s behavior as dictatorial it has permanently shifted the word in the minds of his supporters. When the WSJ writes an article referring to one of his policies as dictatorial it no doubt influences thousands of people to oppose the policy(at least marginally more) but it also redefines the word dictator (and all its associated words). The gravity works both ways. Now when I and a Trump supporter hear about dictators we think of fundamentally different things. I consider the crimes of the coercive state, they think of a border wall.
Euphemistic Pooling is everywhere in politics. When the Biden administration directed officials in Customs and Border Protection as well as Customs Enforcement to stop using the term “Illegal Aliens'' the acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner Troy Miller said “The words we use matter and will serve to further confer that dignity to those in our custody.” By referring to illegal immigrants as “undocumented individuals” or “asylum seekers” the goal isn’t to deceive or signal in group loyalty - at least exclusively - as someone like Steven Pinker seems to be implying. Instead, there is a genuine belief that by connecting the ideas of illegal immigration to the meaning space of an asylum seeker the concept itself becomes more sympathetic and they are probably right!
Humans engage in this behavior in their personal lives with remarkable subtlety. If you listen closely to the conversations of your peers you will see the dance they play. Rather than directly attacking someone they will usually attack an idea that is closely related to them. Perhaps they will drop a remark implying a podcast they are known to listen to is problematic or anything else from an infinite playbook. Humans are amazing creatures! The core idea is always the same, we aim to change the way a person or thing in reality is perceived by affecting those ideas and words to which it is closely related.
In our lives though only a small fraction of Euphemistic Pooling is done to tear a group or individual down. Instead, overwhelmingly it is a tool of everyday human communication. When you are trying to be a wingman for a friend, you rarely directly say how amazing he is but instead, talk about how cool his job is or how interesting a hobby he has is. The idea here is to subtly improve the meaning space of your friend.
Even consider just the idea of “labeling” a relationship. When young people I know are resistant to the idea of naming their dating dynamics it is because they understand how powerful words are. Even if they could somehow negotiate a boutique contract with their sexual partner simply by referring to them as a “Boyfriend” you inherit an entire basket of meaning which changes the dynamic. Thus, the reality of your relationship is directly impacted by the type of word you use to describe this relationship.
Realities Boundaries
I do not want to mislead here. There are strong limits on how much language can change because it is inherently a tool we use. In this essay for example I have a point I want to communicate and I’m using language to try and capture the core but I’m always falling short like Tantalus trying to take a sip of water. Words are practical in the sense that to be useful they have to be interpretable by the listener. I could redefine state ownership of the means of production as “Christian Charity” and doubtless convince millions of Christian conservatives of the value of this idea. But if they opposed nationalization for real reasons like their economic livelihood this sham can only be maintained temporarily. Eventually, the necessity of language would collapse towards the real meaning. As I discussed in the first section there is a gravity to concepts that forces words to take on the deeper normative meaning of what they refer to. When you move the words you succeed in changing the equilibrium but only within strict limits.
In “Authority and American Usage”, David Foster Wallace is correct in arguing that what matters is the substance, not the language. Language is not some pure thing, though it exists within our own mind and only by having overlapping conceptions of reality are we able to actually communicate. Language is recursively tied to the reality we all operate in by the necessity of its use. But it reflects both reality and our aspirations about it. Changing the words we use matters and can have tangible effects, ideas as small as our lives or as big as our role in the Universe. It appears that right now the only people who have even an inkling of this fact in any explicit way are actors on both the far right and far left. Unless Liberals like myself are willing to engage with this truth we risk conceding the delicate process of constructing our shared reality to people who want to implement radical social change. Thus I call for a Contra-Copernican understanding of language. Where rather than reality sitting in the center around which words dance or words being a pure construction of the powerful to oppress, instead both and neither is the “central” point around which language moves. Language is a mirror reflecting itself into eternity, subtle changes echo in unexpected ways.
