“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1872
Well, we all know what happens to unbalanced, thin-shelled types who make summary judgements from the tops of walls.
Seventy-four years after Carroll’s comic excursions with Alice, the British essayist George Orwell observed that the “decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes.” In politics as in business, reason and truth have never been the prime levers for marketing shiny new fears and desires. That’s the job of emotion and manipulation. Along the way, meaningful language goes profitably pear-shaped. Or egg-shaped, if you prefer.
Having difficulty with problematic public perceptions? Just rework words like Humpty Dumpty did. Stealing from the poor to give to the rich becomes “tax relief.” Environmentalists become “preservationists.” A bill which increases pollution and mercury contamination is called the “Clear Skies Act,” and a bill to cut down trees is called “The Healthy Forest Initiative.” And “the War on Terror” becomes the more inclusive “War on Extremism.” On it goes.
And why would anyone expect such Jabberwocky to have let up over the past few years?
Consider the word pandemic.
For years the World Health Organization had defined pandemics as outbreaks causing “enormous numbers of deaths and illness,” yet the WHO removed this phrase from the definition in early May of 2009. Severity was no longer a measure. Another change to the definition meant that “many seasonal flu viruses could be classified as pandemic influenza.”
This removal of severity from the definition preceded the rise of the great 2009 swine flu scare - the little pandemic that couldn’t - by just one month. We’ll leave that peculiar timing to the hand waving of coincidence theorists.
In any case, without the redefinition of pandemic, there wouldn’t have been the required standard for a public health care mobilization by member WHO nations to swine flu’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee followups, SARS-Cov-1 and SARS-Cov-2. (Though a serious disease, COVID-19 was the global equivalent in 2020 to a bad year of flu in terms of Years of Life Lost (YLL), according to Nature. See the graph.)
Now consider the word vaccines.
Earlier this month, the president of Bayer’s Pharmaceuticals Division revealed the mRNA COVID-19 shots are indeed “gene therapy” technologies sold to the public as more pleasing-sounding “vaccines.”
Stefan Oelrich, president of Bayer’s Pharmaceuticals Division, made these comments at this year’s World Health Summit, which took place in Berlin from October 24-26 and hosted 6,000 people from 120 countries. Oelrich told his fellow international “experts” from academia, politics, and the private sector that the novel mRNA COVID “vaccines” are actually “cell and gene therapy” that would have otherwise been rejected by the public if not for a “pandemic” and favorable marketing.
It gets “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice said. One online sleuth found that sometime between January 18 and January 26 of 2021, Merriam Webster expanded its definition of vaccine, going from this…
…to this…
The expanded definition subsumes both the previous definition (a), along with gene therapy, (b). That’s helpful, considering apparently even Bayer didn’t consider gene therapy to be genuine vaccines!
Now consider the word vaccination.
The definition of the word on the CDC website has also shifted over time.
Vaccination: Injection of a killed or weakened infectious organism in order to prevent the disease. (pre-2015)
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease. (2015 - 2021)
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease. (Sept. 2021)
Could it be the most recent lexical arc in 2021 - from producing immunity to disease to protecting from disease - has something to do the recent official acknowledgements that mRNA vaccines offer only partial and temporary protection against transmission and infection of COVID-19, while reportedly offering even less protection against new variants? Just another item to leave for the consideration of coincidence theorists.
Coincidence Theorist: noun. A person who believes that all disturbing associations of events and people, suggestive of high-level collusion or subterfuge, are simply coincidences and no more. (Antonymn of the pejorative term “Conspiracy Theorist”.)
In responding to a pandemic that is now endemic, the vaccine manufacturers - along with their booster-shot-flogging proxies in lobbied governments across the world - echo another character from Through the Looking Glass. Specifically, the Red Queen (above) who tells Alice that the world keeps moving so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position.
And to keep such a steady position of command, it partly comes down to who will master which words, from Delta to Omicron and beyond.
Vacca = Cow
Vaccine= cash cow .
Apologies to Laurie but
language is more than a virus. It’s a mine field in a hall of mirrors built in a house of cards on the mad hatter’s head. If we aren’t vigilant in keeping our heads above water in this sewer flood of free floating verbiage in our respective rabbit holes it will be another PanicDemic attended by its evil cousin Jabberwocky 2.0
Oy vey; we've been had again, haven't we. I knew about these new word variants, but I didn't know that they have finally!!! admitted that the word 'vaccines' was always just a propaganda prop. Very fine post, thanks Geoff. And also, the satirical piece in Common Ground...quite uplifting, if you know what I mean.