Let's talk about linguistics today. Circularity abounds. There are two primary schools of thought on linguistics. There are the prescriptivists and the descriptivists. The prescriptivists take language as a set of rules that impart meaning to words and sequences of words. Definitions and grammatical rules determine interpretation, and guide the construction of your sentences. On the other side, there are the descriptivists. The descriptivists study language as it is used, and describe how meaning is attributed by the users of a language to words and sequences of words. To descriptivists, language changes as its users change how they speak and write.
My leanings are clearly prescriptivist. My stodgy, mathematically-oriented brain interprets language as an algorithm, and applying an algorithm requires rule-bound rigor. Without that, my brain starts complaining at me, and I don't like that. Do I enjoy breaking grammatical rules in certain circumstances? Of course. Notice how I just did so, with an incomplete sentence. How do I determine which rules I break, and when? Perhaps that is a subject for another post. A long one. (Hey! Another incomplete sentence! I'm on a roll!) Regardless, I get uncomfortable when people change the language. "Data." Plural. "Media." Plural. "Fake news." Stories with zero factual basis created by tricksters for malicious purposes, not stories that Donald Trump prefers the media not to cover.
"Collusion." What is the most appropriate definition of collusion? Two or more actors, working together, secretly, to achieve the same goal, when their cooperation toward that goal violates some principle. That would seem to check the major boxes for the primary definitions of "collusion," such as collusion in price-fixing agreements in economics. Two or more firms agree, secretly, to raise prices above what the price would be in a competitive market, thereby securing higher profits for each firm, with the agreement violating anti-trust provisions in the law, as well as general principles of market competition. One could tweak the definition in a variety of ways. As "prescriptive" as I am, I recognize that there are multiple definitions of most words, including, "collusion."
At what point, though, do we leave prescriptivism? When you are no longer using an existing, accepted definition of "collusion." If your goal is to reach the conclusion that Donald Trump or his campaign didn't "collude" with Russia, linguistically, then a descriptivist approach is to redefine "collusion" such that whatever happened is excluded from the term, by using the term, "collusion," in such a way as to exclude whatever happened, and getting enough people to go along that linguistic descriptivists must accept that Trump didn't "collude" because the definition of the word has changed, simply by enough people using the word in that manner. Insane? Yes. Orwellian, in fact. However, if you accept the principles of linguistic descriptivism, and Donald Trump can get enough people to use the word, "collusion," as he does, then he becomes right simply by his own use of the word.
Did I mention that I kind of dislike descriptivism? Mushy-headed garbage at best, and fuel for Orwellianism at worst.
Anyway, now even Donny Sr. admits that Jr. met with a Russian spy in an attempt to get dirt on Clinton for the campaign as part of the Russian government's efforts to help elect Sr., although Sr. doesn't always admit the truth that Putin was trying to help him because he is the lying-est sack of shit who ever lied a lie. (See? Watch me break rules! I'm, like, a rebel, or something.)
Does that check all of the boxes? Working together? They were doing that. In secret? Yup. Same goal. Violating a principle? Yes. Foreign campaign contributions are actually illegal. Information would be an in-kind contribution. That's without even getting into the fact that hacking the DNC's server was a crime, and no, hiring Steele wasn't comparable because he was a contractor, so what he did wasn't a contribution. Add the fact that the government involved was a hostile one, and that checks every box. I don't know how to define "collusion" in a way to exclude the Trump Tower meeting, except to use what I have called "the Sideshow Bob" defense. Jr. didn't get anything of value, so it wasn't collusion. As Sideshow Bob so astutely pointed out when accused of attempted murder, there is no Nobel Prize for attempted Chemistry. If you fail, it doesn't count. In other words, Jr. tried and failed to collude, and the fact that he failed to collude means, say it with me...
NO COLLUSION!!!
His best defense is the Sideshow Bob defense, although that is made somewhat more difficult by the sequence of lies that the Trumpists have been telling about the Trump Tower meeting. Really, though, Sr. currently says that getting information would have been legal and fine anyway.
What, then, is "collusion," to Sr.? He will define it to be something he didn't do. Whatever happened, "collusion," must be redefined to exclude it. No information was exchanged? Then there was no collusion because nothing happened. Was information exchanged? Then it wasn't collusion because it was normal opposition research. Just redefine the word. That is what Trump will do. And so will Fox News, all of his followers, and everyone who exists within the Republican media environment, and to a descriptivist, once enough people go along with it, the Trump Tower meeting ceases to be "collusion." The magical power of bullshit. Behold its despicable glory.
From a descriptivist perspective, Trump has already redefined "fake news," such that some media critics who deal with the actual topic don't want to use the term anymore to avoid confusion with what Trump means when he says it. Hell, I don't even like the word, "unfair," anymore because of that asshole, which shows, I suppose, that I am not as prescriptivist as I claim. What about the word, "collusion," now?
There is an essential problem here. Trump is a liar. Everything he says is a lie, but he repeats those lies, and human minds are basically weak things. If you repeat a lie often enough, plenty of those weak, little globs of neurons will rewire themselves around the falsehoods, overloaded by the repetition of bullshit. Loud, bloviating liars can have a powerful influence on the weak-minded, even if they are, themselves, weak-minded.
And you know who enables this? Linguistic descriptivists.
The next time I lecture you about how the proper phrasing is, "the media are," remember that I'm really fighting Donald Trump.
Or so I tell myself. Fine. I'm not pedantic, I'm really just pompous. Didn't I say something about circularity earlier?
