Photographic artwork by Kris Saknussemm
Words are fences. And fences, by definition, contain and restrict. Words contain meaning, but they also limit the extent and boundaries of said meaning. Poets, comedians, and other professional wordists extend this meaning beyond its agreed-upon limits. The result is the stretching of words past ordinary boundaries—an esthetic pleasure in one case, laughter in the other—an extension of the fences, though usually not a permanent one.
If words didn't have fences around them, they would have no recognizable content. Each person would have their own individual meanings. They would be like a garden without boundaries or cultivation. Weeds of non-specific meanings or random ones would invade the scope and content giving each word a unique, recognizable content. Dictionaries would not exist. Think of the way words were spelled as recently as the 18th century. The spellings for the same word varied almost as much as did the hands of the pens that wrote it. Then imagine such verbal anarchy on a grander scale, only substitute variant meaning for variant spelling. If that were the case, no communication would be possible.
But we do have dictionaries, and we do have accepted usage that defines, i.e., fences in the meanings of words. Dictionaries may provide only current or relatively recent and variant meanings for words (with the exception of the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary which has definitions extending back to Chaucer's time). Dictionaries define content and limit for words as those words are popularly understood. Dictionaries do not legislate meaning. They report it.
But if words are the concepts and judgments they contain and are limited by, they also give a reality to those concepts and judgments. We can see this readily in words like "Aryan," once a word assumed to express a reality we now believe to be hollow in meaning, though still fenced in by definition. "Anti-Semite" and "antisemite," its variant spelled without capitalization as if to purge it of its racial character, is another. Neither version of the word has any more content, or rather any more definition, than the word "Aryan," but we assume it does and make it bear a wide range of possible meanings.
Does it help to know that "Anti-Semite" was a word coined by anti-Semites in the 19th century specifically to racialize Jews no matter where they lived or what language they spoke? Is it any wonder that the word can now be manipulated to mean anything the speaker wants it to mean, just as "Aryan" can mean anything from a language group to member of a small minority of northern Europeans and their descendants abroad?
Victor Klemperer, in his post-War analysis of the Nazi years (The Language of the Third Reich), writes about how deeply Nazi word/concepts penetrated even ordinary Germans. Some were harmless, such as the mechanic who congratulated himself on successfully repairing Klemperer's disabled car, saying "I think I organized that pretty well." Organizien was an American import, like so much of Nazi thinking. And a fellow worker in a packing plant where Klemperer, a professor of 18th-century French literature, was forced to work presented "Jewish" Klemperer with a precious apple for his sick wife at a time when most Germans were living on potatoes and little else. When the woman, who was without prejudice, found out Klemperer's spouse was a non-Jew, she innocently exclaimed, "Oh, your wife is Aryan!"
What are the catchwords we use today that are just as tenuous of real meaning and have no proper fences to constrain them? And what are the consequences for our accepting them as legitimate, i.e., designating ideas with a substance in reality?
The classic mother-of-all deeply-held concepts without real meaning is the most pernicious: "black" and "white," or to put it more accurately, "black and non-black." "Black" is a classic example of a word with no fixed content. But the meaning is as obvious to those who use the words "white" and "black" as are "sunny day" and "rainy day." Biologists have long-since proclaimed the concept of race (or "blood," as it used to be called) as empty, devoid of any biological reality. The word "race" is itself "racist" because it implies the existence of significant physical differences among human beings. Yet everyone continues to use the word, from presidents on down to cab drivers, even the most "anti-racist" among them. The admission of a single African ancestor can get you preference into an elite college or cost you a job you might otherwise have been offered. Its existence amounts to a national delusion of schizophrenic proportions. Yet we accept and use it because it's... well... obvious (the main qualification for acceptance into the Nazi elite SS was a photograph).
Less obvious but no less dangerous are words/concepts like "gay" and "straight," "bisexual," "trans." Their meanings seem as obvious as the words "black" and "white," but their use and especially their politicization are also problematic. Likewise for "Marxist" terms like "class struggle," capitalism," "proletarian," "bourgeoisie." And the conservatives have their "socialist," "communist, "welfare state." Words should bring us together, at least as far as their meanings are concerned, not just draw boundaries, even if the purpose of the people who use them is to demand equal rights and protections.
Words are currency. They only have the value that makes them useful for human beings to exchange ideas. It's one thing to espouse equality for all people; it's another matter to construct an identity out of them and ignore the rest of the world. But strength is in unity, in reaching out for commonality, not in constructing walls of identity within which we can feel both safe and different. Achieving that commonality is not easy to do, especially in a nation that both prizes and rejects sexual, ideological and "racial" otherness. It's tempting to give in to the urge to construct social cocoons inside which we only speak to others of our own group, be not free individuals but "gays," liberals, conservatives, or without having any say in the matter, "black."
It's also tempting to rewrite history and give current identities to people who lived in the past but did not use a social vocabulary we seem to think so essential. Was Abe Lincoln gay? Was Eleanor Roosevelt? Was Socrates or Jesus? The answer is no if the question means did people in the past think in the same terms we do, terms simplistic and restricting to the point of not allowing for someone to be who they are without squeezing them into a recognized social, political, sexual, or "racial" category. It's hard to know exactly how people in the past did think about themselves or in what categories they did so. One thing is apparent, though, for anyone who reads even a modest amount of history: they did not think as we do. They may have thought in terms we consider absurd—that people could turn into birds if they knew the right formula to recite, that the dead are never entirely dead if their names are inscribed in a public place where people see and read them everyday (think tombstones). But such thinking does not mean the people of other ages did not have a more realistic attitude toward matters like sexual orientation and would have been puzzled by our associating someone's color with an intrinsic difference in their humanity. The Greeks may have believed some people were born to be slaves, but they did not think such status had something to do with their skin tone or other superficial appearances.
Words are fenced-in thoughts and content expressing what we perceive and, frequently, want reality to be. Goebbels said if you repeat the same lie over and over, it will be accepted as the truth, the bigger the lie the better. That's what we do with words like "black" (or what others do for us). The definition of that word used to be the subject of elaborate, painstaking legal analysis in American courts of law: one-eighth African descent in one state, a quarter in another, a judge's decision on whether or not the individual in question "looked black."
In Nazi Germany a Jew was anyone the Nuremberg Laws defined as a Jew, no matter what the subject themselves considered themselves. Mischlings ("mixed race" as we call our own fellow citizens who have both European ancestry), along with a host of other fine distinctions. The prominent Nazi jurists who drew up this code modeled it on American notions of distinguishing "black" (Negro) from white. They studied how segregation was practiced in the South, and while they didn't think ghettoizing "Jews" the way Southerners did Negroes would work in Germany because "Jews" were so integrated into German society, they did want to rid themselves of them, even years before the Final Solution.
But Hitler is dead, and the Nazis are no more, right? Why, then, does everyone from anti-Semite to so-called secular Jew use the same definition for a Jew as did the Nuremberg Laws? We speak of millions of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. But how many of those millions considered themselves Jews except as we Americans think of ourselves as Irish or English if one of our ancestors immigrated from those places 150, 200, even 300 years ago? Many of those the Nazis classified as Jews were Protestants and Catholics, so the term had no meaning in any religious sense. But the Nazis were more interested in "race," a concept they got from the British and American Eugenics movement and the 19th-century thinking that asserted the primacy of the white race over all others (think 10 million Congolese the Belgians killed with nary a peep from anyone except a few brave souls like Mark Twain).
In this sense, Hitler won the war. It's the Nazi idea of race that informs both gentile and Jewish thinking alike. Half-facetiously, the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand wrote that Jewishness is the only club in the world you can't resign from. So are Blackness and to a lesser extent all the other categories with which we fence in our identities individually, socially and politically.
It's time we grew up.
