It seems unfair to stop reading after the first sentence, or clause, anticipating that what will follow will be a string of words that means nothing. And it gives pause. What is it that this is meaningful to others, but it reads as insanely nonsensical jargon that means absolutely nothing to me? Is it wrong? Am I not getting it? Are they nuts? Am I?

This isn’t a new phenomenon.

Many years ago, the great British neurologist Oliver Sacks, a man with a flair for subtle observations and the clear prose to describe them, wrote a book about strange cases of mental confusion he had encountered. Its title seizes your attention instantly: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

The title was no joke, nor was the man in question blind. His eyes registered the colors and the contours of his wife, but his mind had lost the capacity to interpret the messages correctly. The poor woman had to endure having her husband grasp her head with both hands as if to lift her and place her atop his head.

The mind is a remarkable thing, both when it works properly and when it doesn’t. The mind’s ability to accommodate gibberish as if it had meaning has somehow managed to become acceptable.

Today, however, Dr. Sacks’s title might not pass muster before the captains of the current sexual and linguistic guard. Let me grasp their preferred title with both hands: The Adult Human Being Who Was Biologically Male but of As Yet Undetermined Sexual Preference and Sexual Identity Who Mistook His or Her or Zis or Xer Committed Life Partner Who Was Biologically Female but Also of As Yet Undetermined Sexual Preference and Sexual Identity for a Hat.

The sane reader will note that the only clear item in that sentence is the hat.

And even the hat isn’t entirely clear. A fedora? A baseball cap? On forwards or backwards? But at least we know, with certainty, that it is an article of clothing to be worn on the head.

If I say to you, “I tripped on a rock on my way to the school this morning,” you will know what I am talking about, because you know what a rock is and what it is like to trip on one. The statement is not ambiguous. You will not wonder whether the rock was a promontory like Gibraltar, or a fortress like the Masada. You will not wonder whether my trip involved the inhaling or venous injection of hallucinogenic chemicals. You will not wonder whether I was talking about a school of fish in the Mediterranean Sea. You will also not wonder whether “rock” meant “cat” or “Napoleon” or “n-dimensional pyramid,” depending upon my peculiar and idiosyncratic linguistic preferences, or upon my idiosyncratic view of reality.

If someone says to you that they were raped, do you know what happened? What if they say they were sexually assaulted? Got a clue? We all have ordinary perceptions, the things we observe around us and, should there be a desire to do so, can communicate to others. But what if we used only words that were conclusory, devoid of definition, and carefully filtered and moderated to assure that there was no possibility of offense?

And here I return to what the second madman is doing. Or madwoman: it is more commonly she who is demanding that people undergo pronominal lobotomies. She says that she wants all people to feel “safe” and comfortable, regardless of their sexual identity. That is not true. What she wants is that ordinary people should feel uncomfortable. 

She wants to rob them of their ordinary perceptions. She sows the field of conversation with mines, glad if ordinary people learn to tiptoe around them, but much gladder still when they fail and blow themselves up, because that provides her with the opportunity for more “education,” which means a more aggressive campaign against our common grasp of objective reality and our ability to communicate with ease what we see.

Yes, this was one of Orwell’s points, that between the elimination of words to express things or ideas that displeased those who controlled discourse, to reducing the definitions of those remaining words to the point where one could never be quite certain what someone was talking about, yet still getting some vague sense of the conclusion the speaker expected us to reach, we are left without any actual ability to communicate, and our grasp of objective reality is, at best, a big, fuzzy blur.

Much of this is dictated by microaggressions, the notion that has taken the campus by storm, with the blessing of the grownups who care deeply that every little darling feel safe and respected.  A few years ago, one might have responded that such trivialities are the sort of stuff that mature and intelligent people would shrug off as unworthy of their time and attention. No more.

This is the sort of thing—and maybe the only sort of thing—that can really be called a “microaggression.” If there is a burr in my shoe, I do not make a federal case of it, suing my neighbor for not mowing his grass. I take off my shoe, get rid of the burr, and go about my business. If somebody says to me, “Italy never produced a mathematician worthy of the name,” I think of the Fibonacci family, roll my eyes, and go back to reading my book. Microaggressions warrant microattention: the elephant need not go on a stampede on account of the flea.

This is what we’re spending all this time twisting and turning our discussion over, fleas. All of this would be a laughable waste of time but for the fact that the little darlings take it very seriously, analogize a pebble in their shoe to a dagger in their eye, and hold protests to confirm that they’re surrounded by similarly puny intellects.

All of which would still be a funny thing as the adults watch the children whine over that damn jargonized thingy in their footwear, but for the fact that there are laws, proposed and enacted, that could put you in jail, or at least cost you a significant sum of money, all because you didn’t have a clue what these petty little tyrants are talking about because the only word that has any meaning in their long, boring string of meaningless rhetoric is “a hat.”

H/T Stephanie West Allen