The language gap

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 just came across an example of this in a New Yorker article on Linus Torvalds, the irascible creator of Linux, who decided to step down temporarily after the magazine confronted him about complaints that his "abusive behavior" had discouraged women from working as Linux programmers. The article finds no evidence that Torvalds' notorious rudeness was directed specifically at female programmers, or was intended to discourage women as a category from contributing to Linux.

In any case, the article describes the efforts of Sage Sharp, "a prominent Linux contributor," to influence Torvald's behavior and impose a Code of Conduct on the project. I was struck by this sentence:

In 2013, Sharp, who is nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns, confronted Torvalds on his home turf—the public Linux kernel mailing list.

Now, I have come across the term "nonbinary" before, and I imagine most regular readers of the New Yorker have as well. They are, I assume, steeped in the vernacular of social justice. A majority of Americans, however -- perhaps a large majority -- when confronted with the matter-of-fact assertion that some individual is "nonbinary" and uses the pronouns "they" and "them" to describe xirself, would have absolutely no idea what the fuck that means.

Other examples abound, of words that are pregnant with meaning to Leftist elites but meaningless, incomprehensible or totally misunderstood by the rest of America. "Cisgender." "Privilege." "Being an ally." "Intersectionality." "Safe space." Insane concepts denoted by fake words or made-up uses of normal words. They infest the discourse of the modern Left, these alien locutions as indecipherable to the average American as a Sanskrit mantra.

It bodes ill for our republic that important segments of the elite no longer speak to the rest of us, but have retreated into a make-believe world, speaking an arcane court language that nobody else understands.