Miscellanea: Twelve linguistic abominations the deaths of which I will be only too happy to witness.

  Like other living things, language evolves. It has its own verbal genes; it lays down verbal fossils in the strata of history; its branches can be arranged in a taxonomic family tree. The language of any given era has its own characteristic adaptations, and empowered by our era’s social media, those adaptations now arise hard and fast. Being a miserable old pedant, not all of the new linguistic mutations are to my liking—I might even arrange a few examples of the most odious into a click-bait-type list...

  Like: For the sufficiently ambitious undergrad in Linguistics, I am certain there is a PhD in tracing the origin and subsequent evolution of this unconscious verbal tick. I am referencing like, the adjective—of the same form, appearance, kind, character, amount, etc.; corresponding or agreeing in general or in some noticeable respect; similar; analogous; bearing resemblance—not like, the verb—to take pleasure in; find agreeable or congenial. How did this unassuming little word, once used merely to draw analogies, evolve into the empty and reflexive verbal cement that it is today? We cannot blame the millennials for this one. I have been hearing this syntactical spasm from childhood, immortalised, for example, on Frank Zappa’s 1982 novelty tune, Valley Girl. This verbal pathogen has been around, as far as I can tell, from the 1960’s, and seems to have grown more virulent, to the, like, effect that, like, people are, like, interjecting, like, like, not only, like, into every, like, sentence, but, like, also, like, into every, like, last, like, subordinate, like, clause, and, like, particle. Some idiots even, like, emulate this practice in prose. At this rate, in the not so distant future, spoken English will consist entirely of tonal and inflectional variances of this one word.

  Literally: I know that I am, like, literally jumping on the bandwagon, criticising the abuse of this adjective, but hearing it so abused literally hurts my brain almost as much as being constantly assaulted by split infinitives. For those who give a shit, Literal literally means in exact accordance with or limited to the primary or explicit meaning of a word or text. Unfortunately, in our post-text, post-truth, post-everything world, precise definitions are literally meaningless, and literally can literally mean anything.

  Problematic: What do our betters mean when they cavalierly excrete this eleven-letter turd? Posing a problem? Difficult to solve or decide? Not definite or settled? It does not seem so. Open to question or debate? Certainly not. No, what they mean is We personally dislike (insert object, principle, or practice) but are unable to marshal any cogent arguments by which we might deign (object, principle, or practice) unethical, immoral, wicked, or destructive, and to cover up our shortcomings we call it problematic.

  Narrative: The Latin verb narrare, whence we derive our English narrative, means, essentially, to tell a story, and how very greatly has the simple act of telling a story changed with the rise of the talking-webs. Narrative has taken on pernicious, cynical, and duplicitous secondary meanings. Is it because we employ social media solely to sell each other bills of goods? Or to cut each other down? Or to win at online blood-sports? Where once narrative connoted stories bubbling up naturally from the universal root of the human condition, now it entails shouting down obnoxiously at our peers—that is my narrative, at any rate.

  Cultural Critic: Oh for those halcyon days when we had little else with which to concern ourselves than hunting and gathering. Each of us had a finely demarcated and well-understood occupation; you dig up those grubs, I gather up these flints, Torbo and company hunt that wild pig. Then we unwittingly blundered into sedentary agriculture and all of the many blessings of civilisation, including specialisation of labour. Many cultural critics of the progressive variety are quick to point out the flaws in our capitalist system of political economy, when in fact they should be thankful that said system is sufficiently fecund to enable such idle niches in the labour market as cultural critic, a profession of no real utility. I do admire the brass of those who claim the title, considering the job has no qualifications other than a willingness to state one’s opinion publicly. Thus I am a cultural critic, and you are a cultural critic, and we are all cultural critics. Honestly, that is all the phrase entails—taking shit in public as if it were a real job.

  Diversity is Our Strength: Must I really establish my status as a non-racist before parsing this phrase? Oh well, at least this vale of tears is transient. I do not criticise its political content. Like all inane, boilerplate catch-phrases, it has no content. What really bothers me is that vacuous slogans like these pass, in this age of digital noise, for political discourse. If mindlessly intoning such phrases is the best we can do at this point, might we not simply get it over with and acknowledge China as our global suzerain, to end our collective misery?

  Double Down: Unlike in the case of like, double down is not being used incorrectly. Blackjack players double down, and in the online arena, to double down is common metaphorical practice—to become more tenacious, zealous, or resolute in a position or undertaking. Honestly, I am just sick of hearing it, most frequently in debunking-type videos, or in online debates. Differing political teams routinely accuse each other of doubling down, each highlighting the baselessness of the other’s position, as if invoking the term is some sort of forensic win. But this is silly. Nobody wins an online debate, because there are no online debates. On the inter-webs, we all just talk past each other while we talk to themselves.

  Virtue Signal: Interesting word, virtue. The Latin adjective virtus derives from vir, Latin for man. Virtus, denoting courage, excellence, capacity, worth, and goodness, essentially means manliness. Wonder what the progressive types would make of that? Nevertheless, it is another term that has quickly outworn its novelty. Can we not conceive a new one for the obnoxious practice of social-media preaching? I myself am partial to The Olympiad of Sanctimony.

  Echo Chamber: What peeves me about this term is its use as a pejorative, as in, look at those idiots over there in their echo chamber, refusing to hear opinions outside their own. Which aspersion, often coupled with sheeple, group-think, and hive-mind, is hurled with an air of smug enlightenment, as if the desire to be around people of like mind were an ignorant aberration, and not the default setting of the human operating system. Unlike electric charges, like opinions do not repel each other. This social gravitation induces us naturally to clump together into families, tribes, teams, factions, sects, nations, et cetera (the advantage in survivability to our ultra-social hunter-gatherer ancestors of having everyone in the tribe be more or less of one mind should be obvious). I would prefer it if, rather than congratulating ourselves on our wide-open minds, we admit to tolerating dissent only grudgingly, to entertaining foreign thoughts in our brains—normally a right splendid pain—only because we understand that not doing so fouls the jittery gears of our democracy. Let us not be too proud of being on the free speech team here on Minds; it we are all on that team, then Minds itself is just another echo chamber.

  Anything beginning with Systemic: The scope of the conspiracy is truly breathtaking: A tiny cabal of elderly, pale-faced men, quietly and deliberately subverting the councils of government throughout history in order to concentrate power eternally into their own hands, producing an oppressive system that is at once racist, classist, misogynist (and any other ist we may have forgotten). Illuminati hardly does them credit. Clearly this is the reason we are all so miserable, despite the fact that even the most wretched among us are better fed, wealthier, better educated, and live longer than countless generations of our ancestors. There cannot possibly be a simpler and more plausible explanation for our post-post-modernist ennui, like the obvious fact that life sucks, that nobody likes having to work for a living, that nobody likes their boss, and that nobody believes their talents are fully appreciated by others. No; it simply has to be a grand, shadowy, unfalsifiable conspiracy.

  Anything beginning with Gender: Pity us, children; pity us old, unreformed, heterosexual white men and our hopelessly outdated sexual templates. How were we to know, while we were busy throughout history tamping down the political and economic aspirations of women and enslaving all the world’s melanin-rich peoples, that the male sex and the female sex are oppressive social constructs? Let us thank our Tumblr overlords for their tireless efforts at re-educating us in the new Gender Calculus. Binary sex is anachronism. Gender is everything—non-binary, fluid, mutable, continuous, infinitesimal. How stupid we were to assume that the entire kaleidoscopic edifice was erected by a tiny minority of genuine statistical anomalies and a legion of clueless, narcissistic, adolescent attention whores.

  Attention Whore: I should be sick to death of this term, but I am not, perhaps because it is an apt definition of today’s human being. Like it or not, we are all attention whores now.