Danger Zone for Double-Talk
Digby Anderson's valuable new dictionary.

By Mike Potemra, NR deputy managing editor
April 14-15, 2001

The Dictionary of Dangerous Words, by Digby Anderson (Social Affairs Unit, £5.95)

ne of Confucius's key projects for reforming China was the "rectification of names." He believed that things must be called what they really are, and that to deserve a particular name a thing must meet very strict definitional requirements. Otherwise the things themselves would degenerate: People would, for example, be called "fathers" even though they didn't actually live up to the standards implied by a rigorous ethical understanding of the word. He foresaw, one might say, the kind of society in which "father in name only" would be a common and understandable phrase.

A puckish Confucius has arisen for our own times, in the elegant person of British journalist Digby Anderson. Anderson is the founder/director of England's Social Affairs Unit think tank, and he has compiled a witty anthology of very short essays — by an impressive list of contributors, including novelists Alice Thomas Ellis and Frederick Forsyth — about today's euphemisms and other tendentiously abused words. The Dictionary of Dangerous Words is a small volume, but it is dense with humor — and with sharp insight into particular words that, today, need some Confucius-style rectification.

On the very first page is an excellent example: Anderson himself analyzes the word "accident," and how its abuse indicates a growing (and — in fact — dangerous) misunderstanding of the events to which it refers. Anderson cites the traditional definition of an accident as an "event without apparent cause … unintentional act, chance, fortune." But he says that we go on using the word, while paying ever-diminishing respect to this traditional understanding: "Modern society is averse to the idea that unpleasant things can happen by chance; it resents the suggestion that there are events beyond its control. It is even more averse to the idea that unpleasant things can happen without anyone being to blame. So, after any accident the first demand is for an inquiry, better still a 'full and wide ranging inquiry' to find out the cause. The ultimate object of such an inquiry is to find someone to blame for the accident."

Anderson's analysis here is absolutely correct. Anybody who has intimate knowledge of the U.S. Congress is well aware that the reflex has, by now, become hard-wired into our politicians. Some disaster happens; a congressional staffer reads an AP story about said disaster; the congressman goes on TV to call for hearings. Confucius would point out that today's nanny state — with its attendant evils of high taxes and excessive bureaucracy — is built in great measure on a misunderstanding of the word "accident."

In another entry, Peter Hitchens puts his finger on what's wrong with the word "inclusive": It is "designed to exclude, humiliate or drive away traditionalists and conservatives from established institutions, by signaling the organizational triumph in such institutions of extreme or separatist feminism." (In my own view, one of the worst consequences of traditional sexism is that it has forced us to endure this sort of adolescent vaunting by the newly liberated; one looks forward to the day when the equality of men and women is so generally accepted that we need no longer contort the language of, e.g., the Bible, to make what should be an obvious point.)

The Dictionary of Dangerous Words offers intellectual entertainment of a much higher order than the typical criticisms of politically correct thought. It hasn't been published in the U.S., but it's available through amazon.co.uk. Amazon says they "expect to be able to find" the book in four to six weeks — but Mr. Anderson assures NRO that the Social Affairs Unit will make them available much sooner than that.