Tzu-lu said, `The prince of Wei has been waiting for you, in order that you administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?' The Master replied, `What is necessary is to rectify names. . . . if names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.' —Confucius

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. —1984

Below are some thoughts on certain words which I consider in need of rectification. They are either misused, or have come to be used so vaguely as to make them practically useless at conveying any real information. To anyone who may think this trivial, I refer him to George Orwell's excellent essay, Politics and the English Language.

I hope not to be too polemical or fastidious, but I include words that I am tiring of hearing used without regard to their essential meanings. My intention is to expand this list at no set pace, but only when I come across something I think worth adding.

1. Liberal & Conservative
2. Religious & Spiritual
3. Discrimination
4. Equality
5. Tolerance

These two words — in their political senses, which are most commonly used — have come to be understood as opposites. Thus, one's political views are placed on a scale which is labelled `conservative' on the right and `liberal' on the left. But anyone who thinks about the actual meanings of these words will soon see that this is a distorted way to frame politics — or morality, for that matter. Any reasonable person will understand that liberalism is good in some circumstances, that conservatism is good in some circumstances, that the two are often not opposed at all, and that it is foolish to rigidly apply either principle to all situations. Often, liberal and conservative are simply bad categories for what is being described. Consider a few illustrations:

• Civil liberties are a cornerstone of modern democracies. Certainly they are, in general, worth preserving, and therefore we should be conservative about them. But they are also based on liberal principles, as the nomenclature suggests.
• Some fiscal policies, such as free-market capitalism, are identified with conservative politics, when there is nothing inherently conservative about them. In fact, they are fundamentally liberal.
• Some liberal `values' are not unambiguously liberal. Consider universal state health care. It is liberal in the sense that it guarantees free access to medical care for all people, but not liberal at all in the sense that there is no choice of service offered. Liberal is simply not a useful adjective to describe such an institution (nor is conservative).

The serious problem with this false dichotomy it is propagated into real issues which should be treated with thought and precision. For example, in American politics, many value the conservative moral principles of the Republicans. But the label conservative is then applied to all Republican policies — such as free-market philosophies as discussed above — and are tacitly accepted by their voters because they are carried beneath that banner.

Religious has come to characterise beliefs and practices having to do with exclusively `organised' religion. It is often synonymous with piety. It is contrasted with spirituality which is used to indicate `personalised' religious beliefs and practices. In this contrasted context, religious almost always carries a negative connotation, and spiritual a positive. Hence, in response to the question, `Are you religious?', the more socially pleasing answer is, `Not particularly religious, but spirituality is important in my life.'

These words really describe distinct things. As I see it, spiritual signifies that which is supernatural (i.e., not bound to the physical, tangible universe). In most religious anthropologies, spiritual is something we are, not something we do or believe. It indicates that we are not merely physical conglomerations of atoms, but have also have supernatural souls. Being religious, on the other hand, has to do with understanding and relating to a spiritual reality. According to such an anthropology, everyone is spiritual, but not all are religious, if they they do not acknowledge the existence of the supernatural. Moreover, someone who has unorthodox beliefs may be just as religious as someone who adheres to an `organised' religion: his understanding of spirituality is different, not necessarily more or less fervent.

(It is interesting that Sir Thomas Browne, in 1643, titled his personal testament of faith Religio Medici.)

This word has come to mean an unjust judgement based on an ungrounded prejudice; or more vaguely, often simply 'a violation of rights'. Hence it has become desirable to make our society free from 'discrimination'. But in its true sense, to discriminate is simply to make a distinction or judgement - often subtle - be it based on reason, taste or common-sense. Hence, 'he had a discriminating taste in wine'. Taken this way, discrimination is necessarily part of our legal system. Laws discriminate between acts which are contrary and those which are neutral or beneficial to the good of society.

What is to be avoided is unjust discrimination, and it is vital to be aware of what the actual object of discrimination is. In choosing between two athletes to send to a track meet, it would be unjust to discriminate between them based on their race, as the object of the discrimination, race, does not in itself bear upon their ability to perform. One must discriminate between the athletes, but the object of the discrimination ought to be sporting ability.

A current example of where the object of discrimination is confused is in the same-sex marriage debate. Most often we hear that by not allowing it, we are `discriminating against' homosexuals. But in fact, the discrimination in this example is between types of relationships, viz., heterosexual and homosexual, not between the persons. If same-sex marriage is not allowed, this does not prevent a homosexual person from entering into a heterosexual marriage, but rather declines to call a permanent homosexual relationship `marriage'. Whether this discrimination — between relationships — be just or unjust is the real issue.

Another good example of how usage of this word causes confusion was presented in the news a couple of years ago in Ontario, where the government had introduced standardised testing in high school. To graduate, one had to pass a certain set of examinations. A mother tried to take the government to court because the tests were discriminatory. (Her son had failed to graduate because of them.) But surely that is the very purpose of tests! They discriminate between students who are adequately knowledgeable or educated, and those who are not. (Now, whether they were fair tests is another question. I believe it was Mike Harris's Conservative government which introduced them, and they were a particularly nasty lot. Good riddance.)

Equality, in most of its senses besides the mathematical, has become an abbreviation of `equality before the law', or `equality with respect to the application of human rights'. It is, of course, preposterous to claim that people are actually equal — i.e., the same and indistinguishable, but as we lose track of the original phrase or idea that we are condensing in the single word of `equality', this can be forgotten. Hence, people will often say, for example, that men and women are equal, which, taken at face value, is manifestly false. Laziness or carelessness, which uses one word instead of a few, leads one eventually to forget the importance of the omitted few, and to ignore the differences — the inequalities — that are important and good.

The chief difficulty I have with current usage of this word is that its inherently negative connotation is often ignored. Properly speaking, one tolerates a bad or inconvenient thing for the sake of some greater good. Some governments tolerate prostitution in red light districts, not because prostitution is good, but because they think that making it more transparent will attenuate some of its ill effects. But when people nowadays talk about `religious tolerance', for example, they usually do not mean that religions are bad per se; on the contrary, they think that understanding different traditions is a positive thing.

The problem is that if tolerance comes to mean a simple general acceptance, then someone who has an actually tolerant attitude can be labelled intolerant. Someone who believes that his religion is objectively superior to other religions might be called intolerant, even if he does not seek to actively oppose them. Similarly, intolerance comes to be seen as a necessarily bad thing. The person who does not tolerate certain doctrines in his religion is therefore seen as a bigot.

A further difficulty with a watered-down definition is that tolerance becomes all-or-nothing. In an engineering sense, tolerance can be used to describe how much stress a system will take before it fails. The same holds in the more general sense of the word. If one tolerates an evil, there comes a point where the good against which it is being weighed may no longer justify the toleration. But if tolerance just means acceptance, then there is no logical reason to place limits on what is being tolerated. Our religious friend above may begin by tolerating some doctrines which he does not agree with but thinks relatively harmless, and then, under the compunction of `tolerance', allow more and more divergent ideas until his religion no longer exists in its essential form.