Thinking about words …

… Wittgenstein vs. the Woke. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

You can deface a statue or dump it in a river or melt it down, but you can't vandalize, drown, or melt a word. You can cancel a person by trying to get him fired or forcing him to recant, but you can't cancel a phrase. Indeed, you might want to keep even the worst word in the world around so that you can mention it—so that you can give a realistic picture of the devastating history of racism, for example. For the word has many uses, not only in expressing but, as Kennedy's book shows, in exposing bigotry. Fearing the abstract structure itself, which is everywhere and nowhere, which has no meaning in itself but only in particular things people use it to express on particular occasions, is merely some sort of superstition.