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Language Isn’t Very Important
The material conditions of your life (and mine) matter in a way that words do not. Focus on what’s real.
Language isn’t very important. This is obvious to anyone who lives in a state of genuine precarity or hardship. Nobody’s arguing about language in a war zone, or a famine, or a natural disaster. The lives of Americans, particularly the ones who spend their time on the Internet blabbing all day, are simply too easy for them to understand what matters in life. They have nothing real to worry about or contribute, so they spend their time making up new words, trying to get rid of old words, inventing fanciful taxonomies that classify everything they feel or think as though their own internal lives are critical to the human project. Meanwhile, humans are starving, families are destroyed, bombs fall from the sky, the sick and injured suffer without medical treatment, entire species become extinct, the sky and the sea are pumped full of poison, people are murdered in the streets and schools, millions are imprisoned in horrific conditions, and the entire ecosystem upon which every life form on the planet depends is in danger of collapse.
Faced with this widespread suffering and the impending doom of everything we know, the Language Nerds argue all day about words. There are some folks who genuinely…