Richard Littlejohn wrote recently in Britain’s Daily Mail about an 18-page Inclusive Language Guide which has been sent out to 359 English and Welsh local councils. It is aimed at ‘embedding equality, equity, diversity and inclusion’. Which means there is a long list of words we are supposed to stop using. Apparently it is wrong to use the word ‘foreigner’. Why is not clear – I suppose it is not sufficiently ‘inclusive’ and it might make foreigners (slap on the wrist Kel for using that word!) feel as though they are not at home. Speaking of ‘home’ – another word that is also banned is ‘homeless’. That is, apparently, now an offensive word. A man may be living in a cardboard box under a railway bridge but we are still not allowed to call him ‘homeless’. As Littlejohn asks, ‘What are we supposed to say: people suffering from an accommodation deficit? Differently homed?’  He goes on to make a very pertinent comment: ‘Perverting the language is the way the Left exercises its bogus moral superiority and controls the national discourse. This has been going on for decades, but has escalated alarmingly in recent years, as we have been told not just how to speak but how we must think.’ When George Orwell published his great novel Nineteen Eighty-Four he invented the expression ‘newspeak’ which the Oxford defines as: ‘…ambiguous or euphemistic language as used in official pronouncements or political propaganda’. That’s the world we live in folks!

Words are signs, and one of the things we do to discover what those words signify is to consider what the opposite of a word or expression would be. That can bring it into sharp focus. Take, as an example, the great expression of our day, ‘climate change’. Linguistically the antonym to this would be ‘climate stability’. Based on this it seems the goal of ‘net zero’ and ‘renewable energy’ and all the other policies being campaigned for is ‘climate stability’.That is just linguistic common sense. However, there is a problem with that goal. Namely, that ‘climate stability’ has never been the case. ‘Climate change’ has been the state of Planet Earth for as long as Planet Earth has existed! Scientists (using rock cores and ice cores) tell us that Planet Earth has always had a climate that has swung, like a pendulum, back and forth between ice ages and interglacial periods. The last great ice age peaked around 25,000 years ago. The current interglacial period in which we live began around 10,000 years ago. And even during an interglacial period the climate swings up and down dramatically. Which is why we had something scientists call the ‘little ice age’ from circa 800 AD to around 1800. No climate stability there. So if ‘climate change’ is the enemy and ‘climate stability’ the goal it looks highly unlikely we’ll ever get there!

As the population ages the word ‘dementia’ appears in news reports more often. The baby boomers are all moving into the seniors bracket, and that may explain the increasing interest in the word ‘dementia’. One recent news item was about a man in his mid-60s with dementia who went missing from his home in Sydney. (He was found by police and returned safely four days later.) Our English word dementia comes from a classical Latin word meaning, simply, madness. That doesn’t make us feel any better, does it? It first appeared around 1598, but was not used in its more restricted modern sense before the 1800s. And there is a variation I quite like: ‘collective dementia’. I heard a climate change debate on TV in which one scientist said, ‘Any society that thinks it can change the climate of the entire planet just by switching to weather-dependent energy generation is suffering from collective dementia’. When I heard the phrase I thought – yep, that explains a lot of the political world today: collective dementia. Or am I just being a touch cynical?