Someone Else’s Puppet
17th September 2024
If you can’t speak freely you are someone else’s puppet. In that brief sentence alone, any genuinely well-educated reader should find delicious food for thought, because words aren’t the innocent little toys the ex-hippies the BBC loves to sell as language experts, insist they are. They are a constant battleground of chemical reactions that link me to other English speakers like you. Tiny, infinitely potent triggers we exchange across time and space, that make us human. English words connect me to Grendel, to Jerusalem and the battlements at Elsinore. They infuse me with a unique identity. They make me the person my colleagues, friends and family recognise.
What they don’t do is merely colour my skin or label me so some witless sociologist can heap more trash thought on a mountain of unwanted and unwarranted research. Without them we are just gurning chimps.
I’ve been writing about how badly words are treated by so many people for the past five years and even did a radio programme on the topic for the BBC, against all the odds it increasingly seems to me, considering their preference for the ex-hippies. But recent events across the West have cast a lurid spotlight on this profoundly important corner stone of democracy. Free speech is under attack in a way no Englishman who feels any pride in his nation, can ignore.
We have a new government in the UK that in a matter of weeks has demonstrated repeatedly, on line and on screen, its absolute dedication to the ex-hippies’ linguistic faith. They have made it clear they neither value, nor wish to support, our free speech. Meanwhile in that other great English speaking nation, someone who thinks a situation in which social media companies “speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation…has to stop” is actually standing for election as President of the world’s largest democracy.