17 –WORTHLESS WORDS

December 4, 2024

You love evil more than good,    

and lying more than speaking what is right. Selah

4  You love all words that devour, 

O deceitful tongue. 

Psalm 5:3-4

In the Animal Farm post – a couple of posts ago – I wrote about contradiction in word meanings – where the same word – “equality” in that case – was used twice in the same sentence with opposite meanings:  simultaneously meaning both equal and not equal.  Such Orwellian word meanings are nonsense.

I want to note that this problem with word meanings is quite different from that oddity in English vocabulary known as the homonym – a word with the same spelling but with openly different meanings.  For example, “bat” refers both to a flying mammal and to a stout wooden stick used in the game of baseball.  One infers the relevant meaning of a homonym from the context in which it appears.  Confusion is, thus, avoided.

Homonym meanings are honest and above board; “Orwellian words” are dishonest and meant to hide truth – as Orwell wrote, “to make murder sound respectable.”* The psalm quoted above is focused on this reality: since some – many? – people have no love for Truth and do not pursue it, they are quite willing to lie; therefore what they say “devours” Truth and our tongues are filled with deceit.  We might say that they speak with worthless words!

(In searching online while preparing this post, I came across a book with the title The Dictionary of Worthless Words: 3000 Words to Stop Using Now.** It is a book aimed to aspiring creative writers, not a dictionary listing words that well-equipped Christians should not use!)

When contradiction is normalized, “Orwellian words” enter the everyday vocabulary and are typically used without any awareness of confusion or dishonesty.  Mature Christians are aware of this and should actively work to avoid using such words in their conversations.

The word that tops my list of worthless word is “Evolution/evolution.”  I think it is quite instructive to pay attention to how often “evolution” is used to talk about change, and how casually and carelessly it is used to describe any kind of change.

So, when addressing “evolution” in living things (biology), Richard Dawkins makes this truth claim:

“In the case of living machinery, the ‘designer’ is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.”***

And then, a few years back – prior to 2015 –Volkswagen – a company that designs, manufactures and assembles automobiles – used this advertising slogan:

Volkswagen, the evolution of Das Auto!

[I also stumbled upon a current website that styles itself autoevolution.com. (See https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/.)  If you pay attention you can build yourself quite a catalogue of the contradictory ways in which “evolution” is used/abused.]

So, evolution is both not designed and designed, unplanned and planned, unintentional and intentional. Such contradictions!!!  Such nonsense!  Such confusion!

“Evolution,” thus, is a word that Christians – and other clear thinking folk – should avoid.  There are several good synonyms: change, adaptation, modification, among others.  Check an online Thesaurus!

The most insidious aspect of the nonsense and confusion that is part-and-parcel of the word “evolution” is the way that it imports the notion of “progress.”  Evolution in nature is assumed to progress, from the simple to the complicated, and from the good to the better.  Survival of the fittest assumes that whatever survives is better than that which does not survive.

In some sense this may be true when it comes to automobiles; and it certainly helps the cause of naturalistic Evolutionism to have its claims about “progress” reinforced by the “sighted” engineers at VW and other automobile companies.  As well, it also helps that a great many people do not recognize the game that is being played and the sleight-of-hand that is at work.

“Evolution” is a worthless word in our culture, even a dangerous word. Note that Marxism and its offspring used to claim that societies “evolve” and that socialism is a more “evolved” system of government and economics than others.  Those claims have become more muted with the tyranny and poverty of Marxist experiments have become visible. 

Now, “evolution” is far from the only worthless word that Christians should avoid and I will soon get to these, but not until after we take a little bypath to explore what room the Bible leaves for evolution.

*         From his essay Politics and the English Language.

**      Written by Dave Dowling.  Published in 2012.  A primer for aspiring writers.

***    Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, WW Norton & Company.