Austerity
The Free Dictionary: n. Reduced availability of goods, especially luxuries.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Reduction in the rate of growth of government spending that can lead to, among other things, the requirement for employees of government to contribute more to their pension funds.
Apathy
The Free Dictionary: n. Absence of interest in or enthusiasm for things generally considered interesting or moving.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Absence of interest in or enthusiasm for politics, attributable only to either philosophical defects in the subject or the use of a first-past-the-post system of voting within the subject’s country of residence.
Social justice
The Free Dictionary: ?
The Progressive Dictionary: n. The application of methods and policies that lead to the elimination of consumption, inequality, poverty, and other human problems, reputedly through employment in manufacturing.
Employment
The Free Dictionary: n. The act of exchanging labour in return for compensation.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. An elusive and undefined activity created by government which, when extended universally to the population, reduces inequality and poverty, but may contribute to consumption.
Revenue
The Free Dictionary: n. The money invoiced by a business enterprise in exchange for providing goods or services; the money paid to an investor from the profits of a business enterprise.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Tax.
Tax
The Free Dictionary: n. A compulsory fee levied by a government.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. Revenue; the money paid to the government by its residents in exchange for the promise of a civilised society.
Manufacturing
The Free Dictionary: n. An industry in which mechanical power and machinery are employed.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. One of the few types of honest labour, the increase of which is the solution to all economic woe, involving a highly unionised workforce carrying out manual toil in the production of physical goods intended for consumption.
Inequality
The Free Dictionary: n. Social or economic disparity.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. The existence of wealthy individuals; the cause of every human problem.
In my two-and-a-half years’ worth of blogging, I have found myself forced to consider the writings, sayings, and policy papers of those whose politics are opposite, and antithetical, to my own. I delved into the pronouncements of the left and, in so doing, discovered that it has its own rhetorical world. But not only that: I discovered that, in large part, the left’s rhetorical world is everyone’s. Its pseudologisms and weasel words—its perniciously equivocal vocabulary and taxonomy—infect public life and the body politic. In the rhetorical world given us by the left, a thing is not a thing: every term has a second meaning, a connotation, an interpretation. Words bear more loads for the left than structural steel.
Not to say this practice isn’t also prevalent on the right, or indeed anywhere else. In-groups always have their own meta-language. But the left have made their meta-language the language everyone has to speak.
I’d like to free these words from their role as beasts of burden.
And so I present to you a new series of posts which I will call the Progressive Dictionary. Words, and the load the left makes them carry. I’ve got a big long list to be starting with, but feel free to suggest your own.
And for your delectation, I’m going to begin with my two favourites.
Consumption
The Free Dictionary: n. The using up of goods and services by consumer purchasing or in the production of other goods.
The Progressive Dictionary: n. The unnecessary and environmentally damaging using up of the earth’s scarce resources in the morally repugnant pursuit of conspicuous social status conferred by inequality.
Poverty
The Free Dictionary: n. Lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.
The Progressive Dictionary n. The unjust inability to engage in consumption (see above).