Member-only story
Sorry, Language Police—Changing Words Doesn’t Change Reality
Orwell was Wrong.
Moralists dream of making the world better by controlling the language we use. I understand their love of symbolic change—it is much easier to make words taboo and create new ones than it is to change reality. The moralists’ belief that words shape reality is known, appropriately, by several names: linguistic relativity, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Whorfianism… The most important thing you should know:
The idea is often stated in two forms: the strong hypothesis, now referred to as linguistic determinism, was held by some of the early linguists before World War II,[2] while the weak hypothesis is mostly held by some of the modern linguists.
Science fiction writers love the idea—George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin, and many others have used it—which is why many readers believe in the strong form today. Linguistic determinism is the science fictional equivalent of magic: the masters of language control reality.
But the truth is the world changes and the meanings of words follow. “Classy” literally means upper-class, but the people who use the term today are not being classist; they just mean something looks nice—which long ago meant foolish, but now means pleasant. People who use a word without knowing its roots…
