To start off, I’ll just copy from my handy Mac dictionary:

 

 

Nominalism: the doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality … Often contrasted with realism (sense 3).

 

Okay, so now we go to sense 3 of realism and find:

The theory that universals or abstract concepts have an objective or absolute existence … Often contrasted with nominalism.

 

 

I mention this because I’ve been disturbed again recently by the rapidly vanishing sense of any meaning in words, a consequence of multiple language abuses by socio-political agendas to re-shape reality. But how did we get to a place where human “life” is a relative term and a matter for personal judgment? How does it happen that a governor says that pro-life people are not welcome in his state—or a mayor says that people who perceive marriage as the legal union of a man and a woman are not welcome in his city? Quite apart from the shock of such blatant, open bigotry, it takes some mulling over to figure out how words like “life” and “marriage” lost their meaning.

 

 Mulling that over, I was reminded of the review I wrote in the current issue of StAR of Joseph Pearce’sShakespeare on Love, in which Juliet’s famous query (“What’s in a name….?”) receives critical attention from Pearce. No one seems to have noticed it before, but in light of the debate over realism vs. nominalism, contemporaneous with Shakespeare, the line assumes more than a little importance. For our own time, what’s most noticeable is that the philosophical nominalists have assumed victory. To be sure, immediately after each of the nationally televised verbal incidents occurred, several camouflage experts rushed to the defense of these politicians with: “Well, what he meant was ….” But what they meant was what they said: words have meaning.

 

 

For me, it was always significant that God gave Adam the task of naming all the creatures in Eden, and when he named them, they became what they are. That is the inestimable power of words. Later, when I became a Christian, I understood more fully “Through Him (the Word), all things were made,” and the mysterious “authority” with which He spoke—words.

 

Keats (I think it was) called poets “unacknowledged legislators.” Poetic praise creates a hero, and satire can literally destroy one. Kings feared scops and bards, poets and prophets, much more than they feared any army, and with good reason: They wielded the most potent tool in the history of man—words. What is this power of words? Meaning. Words have meaning. And the mysterious “authority” with which Christ spoke was just that: Meaning, logos. The recognizable authority came from the Author.

 

And that is why, if one wants to alter reality, they must first alter meaning—the meaning of words. No one is more aware of the potency of words than those who work to render them impotent, to make “life” or “love” mean whatever suits their purpose.

 

Juliet would discover “what’s in a name” and pay for that discovery with her heart and her life. And so do we. Disagreement is now named “hate,” and the expression of a differing opinion is named “hate speech”—which they have made into a crime. Freedom of speech now means only “freedom to express agreement,” just as freedom of religion now means “freedom to worship in private” and never to express one’s faith publicly because that would be “hate speech.”

 

Odd little things, squiggly little linguistic phenomena have surfaced to reveal this reality-destroying loss of meaning, The young now seem unable to speak at all of actual reality; instead, everything is expressed in terms of comparative likeness; ie., what something might be if it actually were. “Like he goes—hey, ‘sup—and like I didn’t answer, and so we like didn’t talk much. Know what I mean?” Nothing actually is; everything is like it might be if it could really be. (And no, no one has a clue what you “mean,” because there’s no such thing as meaning, anyway.)