Language constantly fascinates me. I dabble in it here at the magazine, always seeking the appropriate words to convey facts, opinions, thoughts, and feelings and communicate clearly with you, our audience. To say what we mean and mean what we say, as the phrase goes.
George Orwell’s novel 1984 presents a fictional government regime that controls its citizens by slowly shrinking officially sanctioned language in order to limit their ability to think abstractly. The Ministry of Love famously is in charge of torture, joycamps are forced labor prisons, and democracy means “you won’t have to vote any more.” Oops, that last Newspeak example is from 2024, not 1984.
Here in the real world, where citizens manage to occasionally come up with abstract thoughts, I love it when people seize control of language to push back against those who seek to hurt or minimize them. There are lots of examples of times when people outside of the mainstream reclaimed language that was intended to mock or ostracize them; the folks featured in our “Keep Cincy Weird” section this month come to mind. There used to be just one kind of weird: crazy, different, abnormal. Now there are two kinds: cool weird and creepy weird (check out the presidential campaigns).
“Queer” was once an insult (and sometimes still is), but today it’s embraced with pride by many in the LBGTQIA community. “Nerd” was once an insult too, but it’s now a badge of honor. “Chick” was perhaps not an insult, but it certainly diminished women; today some gladly embrace the term, including Cincinnati’s Bug Chicks.
Language is especially powerful when it’s used for identification. That’s why there’s such a debate over pronouns. Some people want to align their external identity with how they exist internally; others seek to make pronoun-switchers conform to a certain structure—perhaps in order to limit their ability to think abstractly.
I love living in a city where people are comfortable to celebrate themselves as weird. Let’s keep it that way.
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