In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The assertion is intentionally absurd. If every-one adopted their own idiosyncratic lexical definitions, language wouldn’t function, and we’d all blither unintelligibly in a Tower of Babel. But then, Humpty missed his calling as a British High Court judge. Sitting on the bench rather than a wall, the big egghead might never have had that great fall.
Contorting once-standard vocabulary whose meaning we recently all agreed upon is commonplace on the left
During this Afghanistan data leak scandal, we’ve learned that Afghans deemed at risk of Taliban retaliation for collaborating with British troops have been allowed not only to resettle in Britain but to bring along as many as 22 ‘additional family members’ (AFMs). The Ministry of Defence believes the ‘vast majority’ of 2022’s preposterously profuse 100,000 claims to have worked with British armed forces were bogus. Obliged to house the purportedly endangered and their relatives, the MoD restricted AFMs at first to spouses and children. Yet UK-resident Afghans sued the Foreign Office in the hopes of importing fellow nationals with no legal or blood connection to them. One petitioner pleaded before an imaginative High Court judge, Mrs Justice Yip, who has a future as a postmodernist in her nearest philosophy department. (AI explains that the ‘yips’ are ‘characterised by a sudden inability to execute a familiar and previously mastered skill’ – in this instance competent jurisprudence.)
‘The term “family member”,’ her ruling states, ‘does not have any fixed meaning in law or in common usage. Indeed, the word “family” may mean different things to different people and in different contexts. There may be cultural considerations… there is no requirement for a blood or legal connection.’ This novel lingual latitude greatly expanded the population of AFMs covertly airlifted to the UK.
Funnily enough, the Oxford Desk Dictionary at my elbow doesn’t identify ‘family’ as ‘a word with absolutely no meaning’, for a word with no meaning isn’t apt to appear in a dictionary. Page 276 also says nothing about ‘family’ meaning whatever different people choose it to mean, because a dictionary doesn’t have Carroll’s sense of humour. Instead, it is shockingly specific: ‘1. Set of parents and children, or of relations. 2. Descendants of a common ancestor.’ Though perhaps Mrs Justice Yip would countenance the third definition, ‘brotherhood of persons or nations united by political or religious ties’, as that definition potentially encompasses billions of people and would therefore mean that our Afghani petitioner could bring just about anybody to Britain. Which, thanks to her ruling, appears to be the case.
This is important because – sorry to state the obvious – laws and regulations are drafted in words. Government can only function if language functions. MPs vote on bills written in words that must mean roughly the same thing to every other MP. Citizens are told what laws to follow in words as well. Yet if judges may subsequently interpret legal text like Humpty-Dumpty, there are no laws. The whole set-up falls apart. We’re ruled by arbitrary court decrees, which are not bound by the Oxford Desk Dictionary or any other staid reference book insisting that words mean something in particular. Through the Looking-Glass ceases to be a satire and becomes a primer. Language joins truth – my truth – as capricious, mutable, mercurial and subjective.
Presumably, then, maybe to you a law against ‘theft’ prohibits taking other people’s stuff. But maybe to me ‘theft’ means crossing the street against a red light, so you can’t put me in jail for lifting your laptop.
Surprise – Justice Yip’s ruling acknowledges the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the basis of so many similar decisions deeming ‘asylum seekers’ legitimate and impervious to deportation regardless of their nonexistent persecution or their criminality. The ECHR is itself notoriously vague, broad and flabbily written. It’s this lexical blobbiness that enables judges to regard it as a ‘living document’, whose scope can expand without limit and whose meaning can be twisted to suit a judge’s whim on a given day.
The nebulous ‘right to family life’ has proven especially elastic, even preventing candidates for deportation from being separated from their pets – and the provision grows only more usefully ambiguous now that ‘family’ refers to people to whom you have no connection. I gather the ECHR was never intended to be the basis of adjudication in the first place. But then, pleas from countless pundits such as yours truly for Britain to please withdraw from this catastrophic charter for crooks and charlatans fall without fail on deaf political ears.
Contorting once-standard vocabulary whose meaning we recently all agreed upon is a commonplace technique on the left. Aside from its secondary definition (the proportion of a property whose debts are paid off), ‘equity’ in my 1997 Oxford Desk Dictionary means ‘fairness’. And who could oppose fairness? Except that, thanks to the wokesters, equity now means ‘achieving an equal outcome’, aka Marxism. ‘Inclusion’ means exclusion. ‘Gender’ used to be a synonym for sex and otherwise only applied to grammar; now it’s a sensation of wearing a frock or growing a beard in your head. Most famously, of course, ‘woman’ now means ‘man’.
The lesson here? Not only should parliament renounce the ECHR, but lawmakers must routinely draft all legislation as plainly and simply as possible, nailing its purpose down so that activist judges cannot conveniently misunderstand complex syntactic constructions such as ‘dog’ and ‘go’. Parliament might also pass a bill obliging these postmodernist adjudicators to rule in accordance with words as they are understood by ordinary people – some of whom may be stumped by ‘eschatology’, but none of whom scratch their heads over the meaning of ‘family member’. The bill could even cite a reference book to which these befuddled jurists might resort when confused by challenging vocabulary (‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ come to mind) whose precise meaning might be obscured by ‘cultural considerations’. I’d be willing to loan out my Oxford Desk Dictionary for a good cause.
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