Its funny how certain words become insults, it’s a great way to try and get people to stop ‘making trouble’. It’s a way to stop people being different, or at least noticibly different, and it’s a way of protecting a world that is comfortable, familiar, and possible works in your favour in a least one respect. An example of this is how “gay” has become an insult. “Oh my god that is soooo gay” has become in the last few years a common insult, that I hear regularly, casually used by people who aren’t especially homophobic.

Now I am not a grumpy language purist, offended by the notion of any change in language. In fact on the whole I think messing with language is a wonderful thing. Changing it, playing with it, enjoying it and claiming it back from high-minded folk who want to pin it down into prescriptive dictionaries and grammar books is a powerful form of democracy. I say use whatever you need to communicate. Yet when language tricks are used to shut down communication, to ignore and silence people, to cut them out of the conversation- it becomes sad and empty. This happens with making Gay an insult.

The implication that being gay is bad is obvious enough and nothing new, but the harm goes further. It literally steals the word out of the mouths of people with something important to say. So few words exist to describe gay people which aren’t vicious or derrogatory, and most are deemed inappropriate in formal settings that the adoption of the term gay – claimed and used by gay people for themselves, is one of very limited options. I have friends who actively try to reclaim words – faggot, dyke etc. but the history and connotations are hard to ignore. The only other option available in formal spaces is homosexual which has strange medical/zoological connotations which make me uncomfortable. If gay starts to mean bad, gay people are forced to link themselves with badness, or are pressured into silence. Let the word war commence: instead of being able to discuss the violence, discrimination, damaging stereotypes, and ostrasisation gay people face – we now have to start with simply the ability to define, to use words. It’s a great way to derail a movement which is actually getting somewhere.

The same happens with other words that seem innocuous to me, but if used repeatedly to mean negative things become difficult to use. Feminist – becomes just an insult. The dismissive “Oh what are you? Some kind of feminist?” pushes people into distancing themselves from a movement, a set of beliefs they might actually hold. Feminist becomes a Bad Thing, linked only to the negative aspects of the movement, and defined by its undesirability. Hence we get the subversive “I’m not a feminist, BUT…” phenomenon. People try to say what they believe, feminist beliefs, but refuse to let the other person dismiss what they are saying because they are “A feminist”. Again, self identifying feminists are drawn into a word-war where so much energy is expended in defending the name, the right to share a definition, just get together that the violence, discrimination and oppression that they object to gets obscured.

Anarchism too suffers a similar fate. It is made an insult, used to describe any violent or disorganised group, or anyone throwing stones at MacDonalds or a bank. The definition perpetuated by people outside the movement, leaves people with something to say lacking the vocabulary to say it. The energy to communicate gets lost in trying to explain why anarchism isn’t a terrible thing, rather than what Anarchism has to offer, and the alternatives it has to the injustive in our current social system.

I get so exhausted trying to explain my views to people who think they know them. People that think they have the definitive definition of what words like Gay, Feminist, and Anachist mean, and because of that they don’t have to listen. Words are tools, and listening to how/what/why people are using words is more important than what a dictionary says, or other people say they mean. Asking what people actually mean or understand by words is harder than dismissing and ignoring them but it means you don’t miss what they are actually trying to say.

I picked these particular words as examples – there are others. The same gets applied to Conservatism, Capitalist etc. within the left. Its just not helpful. It shuts down the conversation, prevents engagement, perhaps because engagement is often painful as you realise that the big Capitalist Enemy is actually a rational human too.