Framing For Goblins: Say Your Right Words

Makes no sense at all
Makes no sense to fall
As the world falls down.

This one is mainly for the folks in the media, although really it applies to all of us.

Please stop using the coup’s words for things.

I’m not even going to bother linking to the article that annoyed me enough to write this; this problem is everywhere.

It was just another article on yet another thing Hegseth is wrecking in our military and, though it was critical of the changes and did discuss the problems with making sweeping changes in the current situation, it did not contest his authority to make institutional changes without Congressional approval.

And it kept referring to him as “Secretary of War” and the organization he controls as the “Department Of War”.

This is just not true.

Hegseth is not “Secretary of War”; the United States doesn’t have a “Secretary of War”.

We don’t have a “Department of War” either.

The United States has a “Department of Defense”, and Hegseth’s correct title is “Secretary of Defense”.

Using the right words matters.

First, it matters because accuracy matters for its own sake. If you can’t get the names of things correct, why would anyone care what you have to say about them?

But more importantly, in a very real and not-at-all-magical way, controlling the names people use for things controls what people think those things are. This is, after all, the actual reason why the coup want to change the names in the first place.

If you can control the name people use for a thing, or control what that name means to people, then you can control what people think that thing is. And in cultural matters like this, what a thing actually is is nothing more than what people think it is.

But there’s an even better reason than that to use the correct words for things.

It reminds them, and us, that they don’t actually have the authority to do these things.

The U.S. President does not have the authority to change the name of a government department any more than he has the authority to order the military to destroy civilian vessels in international waters, or to tear down a wing of the White House or to do a vast array of other things they’ve been doing.

The coup has the power to do these things, but not the authority.

And they only have the power to do it if we go along with it.

There’s nothing most of us can do directly, as individuals, to stop the military from murdering civilians off the coast of Venezuela or the vandalism of the White House or any of the rest of it. Dealing with all that will require the collective action of a large number of people.

But each of us, as individuals, can choose the words we use to describe things and the names by which we refer to them.