Humpty Dumpty sneers at Alice for her use of a word.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty says, “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, summarizes the problem with words. We ask good questions such as “Can I trust what you say?” or “How do you know that my words are true?” We have been arguing about words ever since the snake uttered the famous line about God’s Word, “Did God really say . . .?”
Near the beginning of one class I teach at public university, students use their phones to discover the etymology – the origin of a word – that we are studying that day. Why? I am anxious that my students understand that every term has a past which informs how the word might be used in the present. 
Take, for example, the word “think.” When students discover the origin of “think” they find that the word meant “how something appears to oneself.” Whatever we think about, seems to us, appears to us, to be what we see, what we understand.
Do you see?! Even the word “think” suggests that our focus is on ourselves. We form our thoughts. We define our words. We originate meaning. And therein lies the problem. We become the final arbiter, the ultimate judge of what words mean.
Some will argue that words have a long human history and are not owed a Christian source. Surprising, perhaps to some, I agree. The origins, instead, are Hebraic, indeed from the origin of human history in Eden. The first twisting of words was appropriated by our adversary, the devil. And if horror movies are any indication, satan is not going away.
This summer I will concern myself with the appropriation of words. Cultural usages of Hebraic-Christian terms will be investigated (e.g. redemption, guilt, salvation, forgiveness). If ever someone wanted to call out cultural appropriation – which is the adoption of certain elements of another culture by the dominant culture – it should begin with the use (and abuse) of biblical words in American culture.
Both the snake and Humpty Dumpty have a point. As I’ve told my students for years, “Whoever controls the definition, controls the conversation.” Appropriate and reinterpret to your heart’s content. My job is to have you pick up your phone and look up the etymology, the history of words. Acknowledging the source of a word will display the intention of a word and the power that is lost when the dominant culture of the day uses and misuses the word.
Written for and published to Facebook on May 3rd, 2021. I have been teaching and warning about the cultural appropriation of words since 1983. Here is one of my first online essays about the importance of words in Christian history and the awful impact of book burning (from March 2009).
Right on.
I find the left doing this a lot–not so much the right.
In my day, it was “tolerate” meaning “approve.”
Then it was “health insurance” meaning any financial product to cover healthcare needs, not something you normally buy for future needs (like “car insurance”).
Then, of course, it was “marriage” as a social approval of a romantic relationship–not the man-woman relationship it had been since before recorded history.
These days, I guess, the big one is “racism.” Like someone said on (if I recall) a Babylon Bee podcast, if “racism” means what it apparently does now, what word are we supposed to use for the KKK?
(If the right is doing this at all, I hope someone tells me. I just haven’t seen it!)