Shibboleths, ‘badge words’ and the need for lexical charity

Our choice of words says more than we sometimes mean

Derry or Londonderry? The West Bank or Judea and Samaria? The choice is not geographical but political, and reveals – or is assumed to reveal – the speaker’s or writer’s political affiliation. Sometimes lexical choices certainly are consciously political. Pro-choice and pro-life are not neutral labels but words that take sides, or at least started that way. Whether you use a term like ‘cis woman’ or not depends on what you think of trans ideology – a term that probably gives away my own scepticism.

SeanMack, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, the words we use often communicate more than we realise. If you use ‘England’ interchangeably with ‘Britain’, you are clearly not Scottish (and probably not English either). If you can comfortably use a phrase like ‘people of colour’, you probably move in left-wing political, academic, or media circles. If you make a joke of pronouncing ‘working class’ with a short ‘a’, you are almost certainly a middle class person from the south of England, who has somehow not noticed that working class people in the south don’t speak with Yorkshire accents.

On a related note, Britons’ pronunciation of the word ‘scone’ is kind of a north-south marker, but more complicated in most of England. And pronunciation is often as important as word choice. The origins of the word shibboleth itself have to do with pronunciation rather political ideas. In the biblical book of Judges, it serves as a password during an inter-tribal war simply because the way a stranger says the word betrays his tribal identity. There have been many similar examples throughout history, right up to the Ukraine war.

In many cases, though, it’s hard to draw a clear distinction between unthinking tribal markers like pronunciation and deliberate lexical choices. After all, at least when we are at ease, we tend not to think too carefully about the words we use. They give us away by revealing a tribal identity, but not an ethnic one: they betray our ‘tribe’ in the political sense.

Visible and invisible words

The most obvious examples are the words that stand out because they sound slightly strained. To ‘people of colour’ or ‘BIPOC’, we might add ‘the unhoused’ or ‘settler colonialism’ as markers of the American or Americanised left. Some terms have been more successful in breaking into the mainstream, though. Despite its clumsiness, ‘LGBT+’ is now standard in government, business and the media, and even used to refer to individuals, who can hardly tick all four plus boxes. It is those who object to the term who now betray a tribal identity, whether conservative or dissident left.

‘Sex worker’ is another loaded term that has nonetheless become standard enough in mainstream media that it feels old-fashioned or even right-wing to say ‘prostitute’. Some feminists get round this by referring to ‘prostituted women’, but that sounds even more strained. Of course, if the ‘English Collective of Prostitutes’ can use the old word while campaigning against the stigma it carries, critics can insist that ‘sex work’ is uniquely degrading and immoral, even if the term lends itself more readily to the opposing view that ‘sex work is (like any other) work’. When words become sufficiently well-worn, their original connotations fade from notice.

If once-contentious words can become invisible, though, it is much more noticeable when once-acceptable words drop out of polite usage – especially when they become not just old-fashioned but offensive.

As a boy in the mid-1980s, I used to go to church with the Boys’ Brigade in Glasgow. Attendance was compulsory, even for the several Pakistani Muslims who had joined just to play football. One Sunday, the minister told an anecdote that began, ‘I went down to the Pakistani shop’. He glanced at the Pakistani boys to gauge their reactions. They giggled approvingly, and so, emboldened, he began again: ‘I went down to the Pakis’. Everybody giggled.

The point is that while ‘the P word’ was always used by racists – which is why the minister was hesitant – it was also used in a neutral or even affectionate sense, especially when referring to the local shop. (Much like the neighbourhood ‘Chinky’ of the time.) Over the years, this benign usage declined in a kind of reverse snowball effect, until the word was rarely used as anything but a racist epithet. Occasionally, you’d hear someone insisting, ‘I don’t mean it in a racist way; it’s just an abbreviation’, but a usage you have to explain every time you say it is never going to last.

For some, however, swimming against the tide is no deterrent. The Italian former footballer Paolo di Canio notoriously described himself as ‘a fascist, not a racist’. Di Canio was known for giving fascist salutes to the traditionally far-right supporters of his boyhood team Lazio (also the favourite team of the ‘deeply misunderstood’ Mussolini). But he clearly felt affronted by the suggestion that his affinity for Il Duce should make him a bad person. The airbrushing of racism out of fascism might be objectionable, but di Canio’s claim, made in 2005, is made more understandable by the inversion of the potency of the two terms.

If in theory it's considered bad to be racist and much worse to be fascist, the promiscuous misuse of the latter term – which has only intensified in the past 20 years – has robbed it of its power. When everyone from Donald Trump to JK Rowling is a fascist, it’s easy to shrug it off as meaningless abuse, which it often is (or to pass it off as a bizarre kind of heritage in di Canio’s case). But, even if the word racist is overused too, it still means something. It stings to be accused of harbouring an irrational prejudice that most of us abhor.

Words worn as badges

Indeed, it’s usually taken for granted that those accused of racism will be offended. The potency of the charge comes from the fact that we are all anti-racists now, or at least say we are. An important consequence is that those who want to claim anti-racism as part of their identity – a more exclusive identity – have to redefine it to exclude the well-meaning but insufficiently radical.

While the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ seemed to do the opposite, setting the bar ridiculously low for anti-racism, the movement associated with it in fact pushed the definition in a far more radical direction. To be a true anti-racist was to condemn America – and Britain in the case of the UK franchise – as racist to the core. And to give a practical edge to its radicalism, the movement adopted the far more challenging slogan: ‘Defund the police’.

Not just challenging, but weird if you stopped to think about it. I can’t be the only person who found myself wondering, ‘Why defund? Is that even a word?’ Why not go for that time-honoured anarchist demand, ‘Abolish the police’? In fact, the slogan reflects the peculiarities of American municipal politics, in which local governments vote on how much of their budgets to devote to various priorities, the police included. Rather than trying to abolish or even reform the police, radicals saw an opportunity to pressure sympathetic local politicians simply to divert its funding into other social services. That was the theory, at least.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, this dubious tactic of the American radical left became a global slogan, deployed in contexts where it made little sense. Police services in the UK, for example, are mostly funded directly by central government. Like ‘Hands up – don’t shoot!’, the slogan ‘Defund the police’ owed more to fashion than to the realities of British politics or policing. (Inevitably, it also influenced the right, with ‘Defund the BBC’ preferred over the more obvious and appropriate ‘Abolish the licence fee’.)

In this way, our choice of words can serve less as an accidental giveaway than as a deliberately worn badge of allegiance, or as an indication that we are in the know or up to speed with the latest thing. In one episode of The West Wing, a puppyish intern from a political family is told off for referring to members of the US Supreme Court as ‘the Supremes’ in an attempt to signal his insider status. I tend to feel similarly disapproving when I hear other British people talking about ‘the GOP’ or ‘the Dems’ – or generally overidentifying with American politics – but no doubt I’ve been guilty of the same kind of thing.

In at least one case, words are literally worn as badges: pronoun pins (Americanism intended). Ostensibly, these are worn to indicate what is no longer supposed to be obvious – or to establish a convention in a bid to reduce awkwardness in cases when it really is not – but in effect they also signal the wearer’s support for trans ideology (or the fact that they really need this job). Again, refusal or scepticism about such badges also sends a signal.

Them and us

Another contentious linguistic issue arising from the trans phenomenon is the use of ‘they/them’ pronouns for individuals who identify as ‘non-binary’. The problem is not that the ‘singular they’ is alien to English, but precisely that it has an established usage. It has always been used to denote an unknown or hypothetical someone of either sex, and most of us continue to use it that way all the time: ‘If anyone else wants to come on this trip, they should tell me by the end of the week’. It’s also used deliberately to avoid giving too much away, for example before announcing the winner of a competition: ‘The judges said this person had really done their research, and that they had a great sense of humour.’

Sometimes, ‘they’ is also used to create distance. If I’m telling you what my friend said about something but don’t particularly want to draw attention to that person as an individual, I might keep referring to ‘what they said’ even if I’ve already mentioned that his name is Jim. In a supermarket recently, I heard an announcement that went something like, ‘If a Mrs So-and-so is in the store, would they please report to the customer service desk’. Now, it’s a fair bet that Mrs So-and-so would not have objected to being referred to as she. The announcer was reinforcing that distancing ‘a’ in ‘a Mrs So-and-so’, perhaps anxious not to sound overly familiar. (A young person thing?)

All this is why it feels weird to use they and them when referring directly to a particular person in normal circumstances. It leaves a question mark in the air, not just about the person’s gender, but about the speaker’s attitude to them. It’s true that language evolves, and perhaps in time this weirdness will fade. It probably depends on whether non-binary turns out to be a long-suppressed reality or a short-lived experiment. In the meantime, the ‘shibboleth’ test here is not so much whether we are willing to use they/them pronouns for those who prefer them, as whether we do so with enthusiasm or bewilderment. Sceptics are more likely to veil their doubts in self-deprecation – ‘I can’t keep up!’ – than to risk hurting anyone’s feelings.

Ultimately, though, there is no neutral option when it comes to shibboleths. As much as many people would like to opt out of the so-called culture wars, even calling them that (or refusing to) is taking a side, or appearing to. That’s why it’s important to be charitable. We should not assume people’s words reveal hard and fast positions. Nor should we seek to police people’s pronouns, proper nouns or anything else. (‘Defund the language police!’) But we should think at least a little about our own word choices.

One good reason to avoid the word ‘woke’, for example, is that some people will take it as a licence to disregard everything you say about woke or anything else. Certainly, there are those on the right who seem to think, ‘What’s that new word for things I don’t like? Woke. This is woke!’ Equally unthinking liberals will then roll their eyes, confirmed in the view that woke is just what horrible people call everything that is good and decent.

Nevertheless, I have often used the word on this Substack, not as a term of abuse but as a descriptor, because I think most good-faith readers know what I mean by it, which is not the same as apparent alternatives like progressive or even politically correct. (See, for example, my short series on ‘What ‘woke religion’ reveals about secular morality’.)

As much as possible, we should all do people the courtesy of trying to discern what they actually mean by their words, even if we dislike their way of putting it. There’s more to the city on the Foyle than Derry versus Londonderry – and more to the world than the words we use to describe it – and it would be a shame if we couldn’t talk about it for fighting over what to call it.