Words Change! (A preemptive defense of G.K. Chesterton)

If you spend much time with Catholics, you've probably heard of G.K. Chesterton. You might even be someone who quotes him compulsively, or someone who's frankly exhausted of hearing about him all the time. I suppose, in principle, a person could be both, but I'll merrily own up to being one of the former myself. Now, by some quirk of Providence, from the time of his death right up to the present moment, that big beardless Santa Claus has been almost entirely overlooked by the intellectual enemies of the Faith--like the tallest, fattest hobbit in history, creeping through the very entrails of Pandemonium while the Lidless Eye is fixed elsewhere. It may even be that the (pseudo-)intellectual arm of the Left is aware of him and desperately trying to ignore him, just as I once heard from a former Jehovah's Witness that their missionaries are explicitly told to stay away from known Catholic households lest they be converted themselves. But if people like Dale Ahlquist, founder of the Chesterton Society, have their way, the mainstream will eventually have to come to grips with Gilbert's massive paws. And when that happens, we already know the first thing they're bloody well going to say. It's about as rare and meaningful as a friendly observation on the weather, these days. Sing it with me, you all know the words: "He's a racist!"

In preemptively defending Chesterton, I must incidentally throw my hat into the ring with Mark Twain. Now, Twain was no champion of the Church (although even he couldn't help admiring St. Joan of Arc); but he was also no racist. In his own time, he was probably one of the more vociferous sympathizers with the plight of Black people in America. But, because the slavering cur of the "intellectual" Left snaps foamily at every available hand, even the ones trying to feed it, there's been a long-standing debate in academic circles about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Those boys were far ahead of their time in treating the Black people whom they encountered as--just imagine this!--people who were Black. That is to say, they treated them with the same dignity as any other person, without pretending that they weren't distinguished from one another by unfortunate circumstances of society because of their differing skin colors. But, even more unfortunately (apparently), Tom and Huck happened to use one particular word that has since acquired such loathsome connotations. Hereinafter, so that this article is not banned by Google, I'm going to replace that word with "Ninja."

If you've read this far, you may have also read the title of this article. Everyone remembers the old Christmas carol "Deck the Halls." Everyone knows the line, "Don we now our gay apparel." And everyone is aware that the word "gay" no longer means what it did when that line was written. People with Autism (like this guy) used to be called "idiots." It wasn't an insult. It was just the accepted medical terminology. Over time, it came to be employed as an insult; and for that reason, over time, it fell into disfavor in the medical community. The exact same thing happened with the word "retarded," which used to mean--well--what it actually means, i.e. impeded or slowed down in terms of one's progress. We don't use that term anymore, because it eventually came to be too widely used as an insult; but the entire reason it became an insult in the first place is precisely because it was originally an accepted medical term. My dad raised me to distinguish between the verb "quote" and the noun "quotation," and I still twitch a tiny bit when I see "quote" used as a noun; but, dislike it though I may, I have to acknowledge that the Oxford English Dictionary has now officially accepted "quote" as a noun. It's a noun. Why? Because, in practice, language is determined by usage.

In the time of Mark Twain, the word Ninja simply didn't have the horrible connotations it has today. Tom and Huck used the word innocently, intending no offense, because at that time it wasn't considered offensive. And here comes the gut-punch: occasionally, G.K. Chesterton used the word Ninja as well. He didn't mean it as a slur, and he couldn't have done so, because at that time, it was not a slur. The battle for Twain has already become an irrelevant border skirmish, because the entire Western Canon has been eviscerated by the ludicrously misnomered intelligentsia. (And, as Dr. William Gonch points out in this brilliant article, there's an actual upside to that: now that students are no longer required to read the truly Great Books, they can just read them for fun.) But when they come for Chesterton, who once said of Aquinas that "He had all the unconscious contempt which the really intelligent have for an intelligentsia," I want us to be prepared.

Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us!