The language gap: AOC edition

I don't like to write about AOC. It's an unpleasant subject in more ways than one, and I don't like to give her any more attention than she already gets from a crazed media (especially the conservative media, which is making the same mistake with regard to AOC that the mainstream media made with Trump).

That said, AOC fits so perfectly into a phenomenon I wrote about last September that I couldn't resist. From that post:

One worrying sign of the sharpening polarization in America is the increasing inability of the Blue Church to communicate with the rest of the country. Not only do the bizarre ideological fixations of the Left appear to the majority of Americans to be increasingly unhinged and divorced from reality, but the very vocabulary of the Left -- the actual words Leftist use -- bear an ever-more-tenuous connection to normal English.

I was recently thinking about AOC's "voice"... the distinctive way that she communicates on Twitter. Love it or hate it (personally, I find it about as appealing as a million fingernails scraping a chalkboard in unison), there is no denying its power and appeal to a large swath of the country.

AOC's "voice" is a millennial voice, narcissistic and self-satisfied, aggressively liberal, but reasonable-sounding enough to command wide assent. Something else caught my attention too. AOC may be the first mainstream, national politician to communicate in the strange vernacular of Social Justice - an idiom that includes terms and phrases such as these:

• "calling in"
• "centering their concerns"
• "climate delayers"
• "frontline/impacted communities"
• "intersectionally"
• "Latinx"
• "LGBTQ+ inclusion"
• "tokenism"

It goes without saying that, although her meaning is usually clear in context, many of the terms that she uses are totally incomprehensible to normal Americans. "Latinx"? WTF?

I close with this characteristic AOC tweet:

GOP defensively say, “we’re not scared of dancing women!” yet proceed to use footage of me dancing “with the color drained to make it look more ominous.” ?? Spoiler: The GOP *is* scared of dancing women, because they fear the liberation of all identities taught to feel shame.

The USA is so over.