One who glances at the typical Westerner’s intellectual – an adjective I use in the loosest possible sense — diet of CNN, the BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, the Economist, the New York Times, and so forth will notice a curious process occurring to the meanings of words. Certain words and phrases, endowed with profound and widely-understood meaning long ago for the sake of sincere communication, become degraded, debased and diluted. They get used in dubious or outright wrong ways so frequently that at some point the concept or experience originally assigned to the word becomes completely forgotten. Articulating these concepts, […]