Noah Rothman: Language Policing Misses the Real Problem

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Something of a sidebar:
Manipulating and controlling language is one of the Orwellian left's main weapons.
   They have wielded it very, very successfully.
   In addition to the other problems with New Newspeak discussed by Rothman, perhaps the biggest problem is:  terminology that presupposes the truth of some radical, implausible leftist theory or other. 
For example: 'trans woman.' Even conservatives have fallen into using this term to refer to men who misrepresent themselves as women. But to call Smith a "trans woman" seems to presuppose that he's a woman. So, just by getting people accustomed to using the term, they've won part of the battle.
   We oughtn't to hand them that partial victory just because we're too cowed to refuse to use the term, and/or too lazy to think up a more accurate one.

   My long-standing suggestion is that we just invert their terminology to make it more accurate. So if Smith is a man misrepresenting himself as a woman, we'd call him a trans man rather than a trans woman. 

   This inversion of terminology would not only be more accurate, it would, I think, tend to throw any discussion using these terms into confusion, thus, perhaps, leading to the rejection of such terminology entirely.

   Much of the left's weird cant tends to sow confusion--which benefits the side with the weaker, less plausible position. As the side with the much stronger position and arguments, it's in our interest to disrupt their efforts to disrupt rational discussion of the issue.