On the road…again!!!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek
Political Etymology
Maybe you don’t follow politics closely, as perhaps most people would acknowledge. But politics follows you. Sometimes you can spot the tail, and sometimes you are not quite sure. The political stalkers don’t tell you that they have been hired to stalk you, and they are not obliged to tell you who hired them. We generally identify them as journalists or political pundits. They exist not to harm you, but to inform you, even if you don’t always like the message. Sometimes, however; we really don’t get the point, even when we get the message. That is where political etymology comes in.
As a true confession, the Footloose Forester does not really know, for sure, what the political zinger “woke” means, or is intended to mean. In conservative circles, it may mean one thing but personally, as a self-confessed liberal, the Footloose Forester thinks it mean awake, aware, and informed. As regards the literary reference to its presumed etymology, methinks that the jury is still out. At the moment, another term persists in confusing more than a few of us. “Flooding the zone” is seemingly a pejorative expression used by journalists to describe how the current Administration of our 47th president files lawsuits by the dozens, of dubious significance, to distract the public from more important issues of the day.
By way of example, in the not distant past, our Potus filed 60 legal challenges to the legality of the 2016 presidential election. He flooded the zone with unwinnable cases and lost 60 straight times. But when your critics are swimming in flood waters just to stay afloat, the issue of right or wrong is somehow secondary and his critics are just treading water. Now in his second term of office as an unfettered authoritarian chief executive, he is again flooding the zone with Executive Orders such as re-naming the Gulf of Mexico or appointing himself Chairman of the Board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Getting back to the issue of political etymology, “flooding the zone” does not seem to gain much traction as a warning sign. To those not questioning what “flooding the zone” is intended to mean, we are left to presume what is intended.
From one AI description, comes the following: The word etymology itself comes from the Greek etymon meaning “true sense” and -logia meaning “study of.” So, etymology is literally the “study of true meaning.”
It’s a favorite tool of poets, punsters, and philosophical satirists—like yourself, Dick {the Footloose Forester}—who know that every word carries a secret history waiting to be unearthed…
The general public has to stay awake, as more contradictory political etymology washes ashore. Not so long ago, one political party berated the other party for what was called cancel culture. It started with a campaign to expunge names and monuments of the defeated confederates. Currently, the political party in power is trying to cancel certain aspects of popular culture. And the beat goes on!