LewRockwell By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
You might deem it self-evident that words should have meanings, but a growing number of people believe words can mean anything the speaker wants. It seems we now inhabit the fictional world imagined by Lewis Carroll, where, as Humpty Dumpty said, any word “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” In the recent “what is a woman” debates, some argued that the word “woman” means whatever anyone feels the word woman should mean. Similarly, in a recent social media debate involving the campaign to “abolish prisons” and set criminals free, a supporter of the “abolish prisons” campaign advocated for the imprisonment of homeowners who defend their property against criminals. When asked if imprisoning homeowners did not contradict his “abolish prisons” stance, he responded that “abolish” does not necessarily mean “abolish.” He argued that claiming the word “abolish” has any specific meaning is a logical fallacy known as “appeal to definition.”
As it happens, the dictionary now includes the evolving definition of a woman. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a woman as either “an adult female human being” or “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been considered to have a different sex at birth.” It gives the following two sentences as examples of the second meaning:
Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.
Transgender woman; Marie is a transgender woman (= she was considered to be male at birth).
Perhaps we ought to be grateful that appealing to the dictionary is now regarded as a logical fallacy, given that dictionaries are increasingly caving in to the new woke definitions of words. We can only hope they will not update the dictionary to explain that the meaning of the word “abolish” depends on what exactly you are trying to abolish. But a more serious question also arises—how are people to communicate if words do not have specific meanings?
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