I have previously written about the importance of having a centralized language Authority. Indeed every other major language on Earth has their own centralized language Authority.
The power to control words is the power to control the production of knowledge based on those words. If the term "mental illness" was relegated to epithet status the body of knowledge standing on it would quickly crumble.
How could researchers receive grant money to contribute to a bigoted body of knowledge based on an epithet?
In other words the corollaries of relegating terms to epithet status are profound and wide reaching. However this needs to be an official designation and not merely a pop culture phenomenon. Without a centralized language Authority it will at best become a pop culture phenomenon.
Currently the use of epithets to describe behavior that deviates slightly from the dominant class is the pop culture phenomenon.
LEXICON SHIFTS IN EVERYDAY LANGUAGE
The primary method that allows a bigoted body of knowledge to guide a given situation is something that I like to call lexicon shifts.
In linguistics, a lexicon (sometimes referred to as a register) is a body of terms used to describe a specific phenomenon.
For example when we are in the lexicon of math we know that the verbal sound represented by the written symbol "two" refers to a precise mathematical concept.
However when we are not applying the lexicon of math the verbal symbols "to" and "too" are homophones of the mathematical symbol "two". A homophone occurs when multiple words share the same verbal symbol. This contrast with a homonym in which multiple words share the same written symbol ("have a Content day" and "what is the content of that file?").
The use of homophones in everyday language without indicators for lexicon shifts is one of the main drivers of broad social confusion. A good pop culture reference is the FDA standard for the term "safe and effective". Both of these terms invoke the entire lexicon of the FDA approval process as they are terms defined by the FDA.
This contrasts with the term safe and effective in everyday speech. ("It is neither safe nor effective to attempt to cross a busy highway with your eyes closed").
When an FDA official states that covid vaccines are safe and effective what they're really engaging in is a lexicon shift. They are referring to the methodology by which the FDA gave the label of safe and effective to a particular drug. The existence of the labels of "safe" and "effective" implies that there was a threshold to meet in the methodology. Indeed the FDA rejects numerous new drug applications that don't meet their own criteria for safe and effective.
There has been an excess of intracultural conflict due to the lack of indicators for lexicon shifts in everyday language.
The fda's "safe and effective" is not a colloquial "safe and effective". Indeed the two phrases are homophones and homonyms. That is they are verbalized and written in the exact same manner but are from two distinct lexicons invoking two distinct bodies of knowledge. Their meaning bifurcates beyond their status as homophones and homonyms.
LONG-TERM LEXICON SHIFTS IN MENTAL HEALTH
It can be relatively straightforward to convince an FDA official that the terms safe and effective refer to the fda's methodology and not a colloquial use of the terms. One needs to ask the right questions in the right forum to elicit a truthful response.
This is because the lexicon shift really only occurs on one phrase. Once the audience has deciphered the true meaning of the phrase safe and effective it puts the fda's official's subsequent language in proper context.
The challenge in the field of mental hell-th is lexicon shifts occur excessively in the course of normal conversation and there is no indicator to demarcate lexicon shifts.
"John is physically sick, he has cancer"
When the term "sick" is used here, there is a lexicon shift to a highly scientific and properly produced body of knowledge. This includes rigorous scientific methodologies to arrive at an understanding of what cancer is and how to treat it.
"John is mentally sick, he has bipolar disorder"
In contrast, when the term "sick" is used here, there is a lexicon shift to the improperly produced body of mental hell-th knowledge. This lexicon shift invokes all of the unscientific methodologies that have been used to conceal the science of mental hell-th discovered as early as the 1950s, which is that there is no known biological pathology giving rise to behavioral deviations from the expectations of the dominant culture.
In the aforementioned illustrative example the term "sick" is a homophone and homonym invoking completely different lexicons.
The methodologies used to arrive at physical sickness contrast significantly from the concealment tactics used to improperly aggrandize mental hell-th knowledge, while remaining outside of general public awareness.
A PROPOSED SOLUTION TO ACCOMMODATE LEXICON SHIFTS IN STANDARD AMERICAN ENGLISH
A guiding principle in my life is that everyone knows something that I don't. This applies to every animal in Time. That is everyone around us know something that we don't and vice versa.
Standard American English does not make official use of tones. About the only tone that we use as a legitimate part of our everyday language is to increase the pitch at the end of a sentence to indicate a question.
"John is sick" is articulated differently from "John is sick?" The higher pitch at the end of the statement indicates a question. Furthermore when an English speaker sees the question mark at the end of the statement it is a written symbol to increase the pitch to indicate a question. If we invert the grammar we can create a question without changing the pitch, "is John sick?"
Fluent speakers of English can recognize that there is no need to add a higher pitch because of the question mark due to the inversion of the subject and verb. In standard American English we can simply invert the subject in the verb to indicate a question.
This leaves a wide open space for speakers of standard American English to learn things from other languages. Specifically many languages of the Orient are tonal languages. With a tonal language the same word, which is often a single syllable, can adopt different intonations to create different meanings. The difference is that these tones are applied to each word and not merely to indicate a question.
For example in Chinese there are a number of different tones for the syllable/word "ma". I am no speaker of Chinese but here is a basic transliteration to help you understand. "Ma ma ma ma" can be transliterated as "mother scolds the hemp horse". Obviously in English we do not have symbols to indicate tonal shifts, unlike pinyin which does. Pinyin is China's version of the Latin alphabet. It contains symbols to indicate proper tonal shifts, thus if I wrote the four "ma's" in Chinese pinyin there would be symbols to indicate the specific tone to produce.
Obviously the capacity to take a single symbol and make it mean four distinct things with four distinct tones dramatically increases the ability to expand the language.
Let's take this idea and apply it to our illustrative example of the word sick. Let's imagine that we attached a higher pitch to a mental hell-th sickness and a lower pitch to a physical sickness. A single tonal shift could indicate the lexicon being used.
Thus the audience would quickly and easily understand the lexicon being invoked. This would prevent, if not outright eliminate the subtle lexicon shifts that facilitate the illegal and improper imposition of mental hell-th laws on minorities.
That is, mental hell-th professionals could no longer present the word sick as if it was arrived at through the same methodologies as physical sickness.
A corollary of this is that public trust may be built and healed because public officials can no longer conceal the lexicon that they are invoking in the everyday use of language.
With excessive mistrust in both science and government this is desperately needed at this stage in the species evolution. Ironically the field of mental hell-th is that the forefront of facilitating this mistrust. This is in part because in order to successfully impose mental hell-th knowledge on an innocent minority more than a single word, such as sick, needs to be used.
Stealing broad civil liberties from innocent minorities, such as locking them away in torture chambers called mental hell-th facilities, is a significant social activity.
It requires more than merely a doctor pointing the finger at someone else and saying that they are "sick"while concealing the lexicon the doctor is using.
The mental hell-th system is driven by consistent and everyday lexicon shifts to slowly move the broad social conversation around an individual such that nearly every word used upon an individual can be considered part of the mental hell-th lexicon.
The following question is for audience members that have no familiarity with mental hell-th. What is your connotation for the following terms?
Refuse
Treatment
Help
Need
Sick
Unstable
Continuously
Resistant
These terms may have a wide variety of connotations in everyday language that are not at all malicious. Indeed some of them may be completely justified such as being "resistant to breaking the law."
However over the course of days weeks months and sometimes years some of these otherwise benign terms adopt lexicon shifts to slowly get the entire social conversation in the lexicon of mental hell-th.
Once this is successfully accomplished a benign phrase such as "John is continuously complaining when he thinks someone is abusing him". Indeed even the word continuously can carry a lexicon shift toward bogus mental hell-th knowledge. What the term "continuously" is really trying to say within the mental hell-th lexicon is that "the behavior is continuously irritating those around the individual and needs to stop promptly or there will be adverse social consequences."
This is a far different connotative meaning than the phrase "John likes to continuously breathe so that he can remain alive".
I would also like to display some vulnerability and share a real world illustrative example that I lived personally recently.
Those of you who have looked at this entire blog can see that I have been recently severely victimized by a previous landlord. Fortunately, I was able to secure some temporary housing under a different landlord who has nothing to do with the abusive one. However this new landlord seems to have taken the Liberty to "look me up on the internet" and see that I am associated with the epithet. In our confirmation bias culture this was apparently all she needed to know to be able to tell herself that she could properly interpret my actions.
The rental unit is a VRBO. As such I paid all the fees up front directly to VRBO. Furthermore I was required to sign a separate contract in order to enter the rental unit. This contract was outside VRBO, and clearly designed to protect owners of the investment properties and not people seeking emergency housing. The contract says that it takes precedence over previous agreements (Ahhh yes, the ol' bait and switch). It also contains a clause requiring me to pay any utilities beyond the previous average of the owners.
In other words if my lifestyle deviates slightly from the previous owner's lifestyle I can be charged. Furthermore there's no defined time frame in the contract. This allows my landlord to continuously harass me for petty amounts of money while I am recovering from an extreme trauma that I already informed the landlord about!
After the landlord advised me that I was required to pay an extra fee outside of VRBO, I resisted slightly as I was taken aback. I have lived in VRBOs and airbnbs for quite some time and I have never been charged outside of the platform. Furthermore I am accustomed to legitimate utility payments being given an entire month to be paid. This contract contained no specific time frame and so it's allowing my current landlord to harass me for petty amounts of money, after being victimized by a previous landlord.
When I asked her for some time to process this considering the abuse that I had recently been through, she responded with a lexicon shift toward mental hell-th knowledge.
That is she saw that I was deviating slightly from the expectations of the dominant class and was quick to recognize that there's a convenient social tool to impose upon me to attempt to control me and get me to pay this Petty fee: the linguistic body of mental hell-th knowledge.
As there is no scientific rigor for a linguistic body of knowledge, intelligent animals can figure out its unique patterns in language and learn how to manipulate terms for nefarious purposes. In other words intelligent animals can figure out which words go with which other words to steer the situation toward their personal expectations.
Apparently this woman was aware of how the term "refuse" can be used maliciously in the mental hell-th lexicon. When I merely questioned the payment, but nevertheless indicated that I was willing to pay, she promptly sent me an email asking if I was "refusing" to pay.
As a minority who is rather familiar with these lexicon shifts I quickly picked up that she was attempting to shift the conversation entirely to the mental hell-th lexicon. This would give her the social advantage of having everyone around her interpret her words as if they are properly applied mental hell-th knowledge. That is consistent and effective imposition of the mental hell-th lexicon convinces those in that social circle that it's the proper knowledge to impose. It is absurd circular reasoning: the mental hell-th lexicon should be used because it is being used.
My behavior and words cannot be wise if they are interpreted with the mental hell-th lexicon. Furthermore behaviors and words that are interpreted as sick lead to social control as a logical corollary.
Thus, for questioning a payment but acquiescing to paying it, my current landlord thinks that it is proper to attempt to impose a bigoted body of knowledge on me. Indeed it would make it far easier to collect the money if I was afraid of torturous mental hell-th "treatment" being imposed upon me.
LONG-TERM LEXICON SHIFTS FOR OTHER MINORITIES
Such long-term lexicon shifts are adopted by members of the dominant class who have the social latitude and personal space to be able to slowly shift connotations of words over the course of days weeks months and years. Generally minorities do not have such social attitude or personal space.
Let's look at some other minorities' experiences with long-term lexicon shifts and how they can ultimately change the entire social situation the person finds themself in.
Let's take a "Black" American. The following terms can carry a negative connotation that will facilitate racial inequality if imposed effectively.
Uneducated
Black (skin color relates to amount of melanin in the skin)
Inferior intelligence
Wild
Uncontrollable
Loud
Disrespectful
Gangsta
Hood
Each of these terms has both a bigoted as well as a legitimate connotation. That is depending on the conversation they can mean something positive, neutral or something rather negative.
I respond to the word "refusal" like a black person might respond to the word uneducated. A black man may be able to draw on their own experiences and see how the term uneducated had previously been used against them adversely. "We can't hire him, he's uneducated despite the fact that he can perform the task".
Perhaps a Black man in America might derive through intuitive means that he's not going to get a job he applied for when his potential employers refer to him as "uneducated", even if everyone knows he is fully capable of performing the job duties.
Without the experience of active social oppression on a regular basis, it is difficult for members of the dominant class to understand how such subtle use of language can have long-lasting effects. What the dominant class needs to understand is that it's not any one isolated incident of bigotry; however each isolated incident of bigotry in one's social situation means that they have less control over their own lives and are more subject to the dominant class imposing bigoted terms upon them for the purpose of social control.
Maybe the employer just didn't want a black employee and so they use the term uneducated to justify denying the job application. Indeed since employers can no longer use race as a legitimate means to discriminate, nefarious employers may be relegated to manipulating language through subtle lexicon shifts in order to coerce reality to meet their personal expectations.
This happens all too often with mental hell-th knowledge. As such, individuals have the label of disability imposed upon them, and members of the dominant class may choose to discriminate against them due to this social disability. However they cannot cite the disability itself as the reason for discrimination or bigotry. Rather they too must engage in subtle lexicon shifts to put the entire social conversation around an individual on the mental hell-th lexicon.
If it can be considered "common knowledge" by a particular social group to impose a bigoted lexicon upon an individual, then nearly everything that is subsequently said will carry a bigoted connotation.
I will close with yet another call for a centralized language Authority for standard American english. This is the ideal solution to deal with bigotry and discrimination in the entire English-speaking world. Furthermore due to the natural power of the English speaking world this will have positive trickle-down effects worldwide. In other words as speakers of a standard American English point out bigotry in their own language, this can help heal the entire world as well as the relationship of minorities to the dominant class.
I will leave you with a joke based on homonyms....
I hope that the content of your day is content
Sean