Sorry, Language Police—Changing Words Doesn’t Change Reality

Orwell was Wrong.

Jordan L’Hôte, CC BY 3.0

Moralists dream of making the world better by controlling the language we use. I understand their love of symbolic change—it is much easier to make words taboo and create new ones than it is to change reality. The moralists’ belief that words shape reality is known, appropriately, by several names: linguistic relativity, the…