Nazi Linguistics

by Joseph DeMaio, ©2021

(Sep. 25, 2021) — Daily, we are presented with the colossal defalcations of the Goofball Regime, ranging from the “all-contingencies-considered-with-no-Americans-left-behind” Afghanistan skedaddle; to the illegal alien eradication of our southern border; to the Goof’s “vaccinate or die” narrative. 

And yet there are additional, smaller misdemeanors emanating from the left and its apparatchiks which are problematic as well.  One of the more irritating yet equally troublesome moral offenses of the left relates to its growing use of Nazi-like linguistics in an effort to reshape the past and infect the future.  

Case in point: just when you thought the insanity of woke grammar Nazis had run its course, the ACLU resuscitates the practice.  Specifically, in a beyond-Orwellian act of historical revisionism – committed, no less, on the one-year anniversary of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s change of venue to that great courtroom in the sky – the ACLU woke-edited a famous quote she delivered during her Senate confirmation hearing in 1993.  RBG was addressing questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on the issue of abortion and a woman’s “right to choose.”

Specifically, her actual quote was this: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.” 

The ACLU – again, marking the one-year anniversary of RBG’s death – altered her words thusly: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [them], [they are] being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”

Take that, RBG!  The ACLU has updated and “corrected” your antiquated verbiage.  You’re welcome.

The ACLU thus “scrubs” the original words she uttered in 1993 in an attempt to make them more “relevant” and “contemporaneous” (i.e., less offensive to the left) to fit the woke “non-binary” narratives now in vogue among the linguistic zombies – just in time for Halloween – wandering freely among us.  All tricks; no treats.

Erasing her actual words reflecting actual gender and biological sex and replacing them with more “enlightened” generic and “pan-inclusive” words is, apparently, OK with the ACLU as it is more consistent with a “living, breathing and evolving” revisionist view of historical facts.  Never mind that it is, in reality, misinformation: Prince (“the ends justify the means”) Machiavelli would approve.  Ummmm… and so would Third Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.  

Quite apart from the macabre ritual of sua sponte altering the actual words of a person after he or she has died – as did the Congressional Research Service (“CRS”) when purporting to “paraphrase” noted constitutional law expert, Professor Edward S. Corwin, in a transparently-feeble attempt to legitimize the purported natural born Citizen status of one Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., discussed here – the ACLU displays and confirms in multiple ways the hypocrisy and stupidity of its blundering grammatical revisionism.

First, the ACLU “paraphrasing” of RBG’s words appeared in a “Tweet” that featured a stylized “open quote” (i.e., a “), but no “close quote.”  Perhaps this was just a head-fake signal intended to deceive the reader into thinking that the following language was a “quote” of RBG’s words, when in fact, it was not.

Second, as if mimicking the CRS, the ACLU version of RBG’s statement uses an ellipsis to delete the entire second sentence from her testimony in 1993.  That sentence reads: “It is a decision she must make for herself.”  Why that entire sentence was deleted is unknown, but it may have been intended to reduce, if even slightly, the number of actual alterations needed to bring the “quote” up to contemporary leftist standards. 

Third, the bracketed insertion of ACLU-approved woke terminology to replace the excised actual words is unaccompanied by the normal “reader’s signal” of an ellipsis followed by the bracketed word or words being substituted.  Bad form, but both Machiavelli and Goebbels would likely approve and ratify.

Fourth, the ACLU proofreaders need a thesaurus.  Several of the words which are substituted for those being excised themselves violate the grammar Nazi’s code of linguistics.  By substituting for the possessive word “woman’s” the possessive word “person’s,” the ACLU uses a prohibited term, i.e., one that contains the sequential letters “s,” “o” and “n,” meaning “son.” 

To the guillotine!  Off with their heads!!  How dare the ACLU erase from RBG’s statement actual words reflecting a specific gender, and then try to get away with substituting a word which contains yet another prohibited word: “son.” 

Clearly, a “son” is the male offspring of a mother and a father – assuming, of course, that the individual is not aborted under ACLU dogma before actual birth – so the ACLU merely adds insult to injury by using the word “person.”  The preferred woke-noun would be “individual.” All this on the one-year anniversary of RBG’s demise.  Oh, the humanity! Shame… shame on the ACLU.

Finally, the altered paraphrase pours vinegar into the wound by allowing another “gender specific” term to remain from the RBG quote: “human.”  If under Naziesque linguistics “woman” must become “person” or, in extreme cases “womyn,” how can the ACLU justify allowing the word “human” to remain?  It is unconscionable.  It is outrageous.  Oh…, and flat-out stupid.

The ACLU gambit is now what passes for rational thought on the left.  Sad.  And dangerous.