by Grace Thrush

How our ability to use language defines our ability to drive change

Words have the power to describe and empower us, giving life to our feelings and desires. But they also have the power to limit and misrepresent us.

When I was in elementary school, I loved being a group leader. I felt that I was great at organizing input from my group members to guide us towards a goal – whether that goal was planting flowers in our school’s garden or turning in our science project on time.

Despite my confidence in public speaking and very type-A love for checking off all sections of a rubric, I rarely volunteered myself for the position. Whispers in the lunch line of “she’s so bossy” after one of my friends told another classmate they needed to participate in our group work haunted me every time the teacher asked for volunteers to be a group leader.

Even as a kid, I could tell that the line drawn between leader and bossy was unclear, arbitrary, and almost exclusively applied to the girls in my class. Often, to be a female leader was to be bossy, and to be bossy was to be dictatorial, imposing, and controlling. Hyperaware of this baggage and wanting to be well-liked by my peers, I tried to steer clear of situations where this label could be ascribed to me.

By high school, the stakes of the language used to describe myself got a little higher.

I attended an all-girls’ school whose stated mission was to educate young women so they could have the skills and confidence to change the world. The school held leadership workshops, taught Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and built an entire new wing to help students develop skills to in science, engineering, and technology.

Still, in the hallways my classmates and friends treated feminism as a dirty word.

“I’m not a feminist – I don’t hate men.”

“Yeah, I would say I’m a feminist, but I’m not one of those feminists.”

While the feminist movement in the United States has seen different waves and interpretations over the past century, at its core, the word means wanting equality between men and women in society. But even at my school that prioritized women’s advancement, the word “feminist” was something that had to be qualified. Rather than a badge of honor, it was a stain on your personality and came with all sorts of assumptions about your sexuality, how you groom your body, or what you think about people of another gender.

At the same time that I was coming to political consciousness and developing my own views about the world, I felt like I didn’t have access to the words to adequately describe these views. I also saw words and values that I identified with become warped and pulled out of my grasp, as movements I became to identify with rejected their usage. While I developed my love for government and my country as I learned about its founding in U.S. History class, I found it difficult to reconcile that love with my shame for what some of our politicians were using our country’s core values to defend.

Over the past few years, it feels like the trend of words taking on disparate and partisan meanings has ramped up. Certain words or phrases have become dog whistles of different ideological movements, leading words to take on perceived meanings that may not be congruent with their base definitions.

Words across the political spectrum – like ring-wing, leftist, diversity, woke, and conservative – are no longer adjectives that people instinctually reach towards to help describe themselves, but charged attacks hurled at the ideas or the people with which they don’t agree.

For me, this struggle around language becomes most clear around the word “patriot.”

Like many other Americans, I come from a long line of government employees and service members. The soundtrack to our summer barbecues was my grandfather’s stories from his time working as a police officer or on an aircraft carrier for the United States Navy. Weekend playdates at my cousin’s house ended with my aunt telling my mom some zany encounter she had on her daily train ride to Washington D.C. for work at a federal agency. Our annual family reunions saw almost every iteration of the “U.S Veteran, Proudly Served” baseball cap worn by my great uncles.

It is this love and reverence I have for our country, instilled in me by my family members and reinforced by my belief in the promises made in our 250-year-old founding documents, that makes me care so much about its well-being. 

So why do I hesitate to call myself patriotic?

At some point, the meaning of being an American patriot was flattened, coming to mean blind allegiance to the politicians in charge rather than fighting for the values laid out for our country in those founding documents. But there is a fundamental difference between unconditional loyalty and principled commitment. Loving something does not mean you cannot criticize it. Instead, it often means that you challenge it to do better when you know it has the potential to do so.

In 1984, George Orwell writes about the fictional language that the government creates to control public thought the following: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”

Here Orwell is reminding us that language is a form of power. Beating down words, warping them into partisan dog whistles until their understood meaning is so far removed from their actual definition is a power exercise.

 When we can no longer accurately describe ourselves, our values, and our goals, we forfeit our ability to organize with others. Without this language that unites us, we are left unequipped to adequately fight in the pursuit of these shared values and goals. 

So how do we go about taking back the language that has become inaccessible to us because someone else has warped it?

Well, reclaiming language doesn’t have to mean inventing new words; it can instead mean returning ones we already have to their original meaning. Using clear language to describe who we are and what we believe in is one clear way to begin to regain our agency.

If you’re aware of and actively attentive to important societal issues, you might be “woke.” If you think men and women should have political, social, and economic equality, you might be a “feminist.” If you believe the government should take a more active in institutions and people’s lives to reduce social and economic inequalities, you might be a “leftist.” If you’re a person who loves their country and, if necessary, will fight for it, you are “patriotic.”

And that’s exactly what so many people are doing – fighting for this country and its values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that define it. Whether that fight takes place via lawsuits in the courtroom, marches in the streets, resistance to unjust policies, or debates across the aisle, it’s driven by the shared sense of patriotism that this democracy is worth protecting.

When we reclaim the language that organizes and defines us, we regain the capacity to speak clearly, stand firmly in our beliefs, and participate fully in our democracy.

So, it’s time to stop qualifying your beliefs and start using the words that name them.