I’ve run out of partners

Back in the day when I was still creative director at an ad agency, I had a stock reply to any suggestion that I bring my partner to some social event.

“Which one?” I’d ask, enjoying my interlocutor’s look of perplexity mixed with quiescent respect for my virility. “Do you have more than one?” he’d ask.

“But of course. I have four, actually: Dave, Dan, Nigel and Mark. Which one should I bring along?”

In the other chap’s eyes, my profligate virility would begin to acquire a slightly naughty edge. As a man of the world, however, he wouldn’t let on that he found anything wrong with an alternative lifestyle, even when practised on such a scale.

“Oh yes, I forget,” I’d add. “There’s also John, my doubles partner. I’ll have to ask him if he’s available when we play on Saturday.”

At this point, my interlocutor would realise we were at cross purposes. I misunderstood, he’d explain, heaving a sigh of relief. He didn’t mean partners in any business or tennis sense. He meant the partner I lived with.

“Oh, you mean my wife,” I’d say with the smug expression of a man who had made his QED point. Yet that was a point only made, not taken.

No modern person would challenge the meaning of the word ‘partner’ as used by my interlocutor. This is one good word cannibalised, abused and perverted, giving me any number of occasions to vent my loathing of such verbal vandalism.

This sounds like needless pedantry, and so it would be if there weren’t a nefarious reason for that semantic debauchment. Yet there is such a reason, as there always is. All such lexical assaults are part of glossocratic subversion, with words used as tools for modernity to put its foot down.

Yesterday I wrote about the word ‘populist’ used as a tool of such semantic indoctrination, but the same could be said about almost every term in the modern political lexicon. Take, for example, the word ‘liberalism’ and its cognates.

Its traditional, which is to say correct, meaning includes aspects of limited government, personal freedom, laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. But that’s not how the word is used today, is it?

In America, liberalism means, mutatis mutandis, socialism: replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, plus as much government control and as little personal liberty as is achievable this side of concentration camps. In Britain, it means the platform of the Liberal Democratic party, which stands for roughly the same and also the negation of Britain’s sovereignty.

For the nineteenth-century liberal, the 10 percent of the nation’s income the government was then spending was too high. For today’s liberal, the 40-odd percent it spends now is too low. So if one wants to use ‘liberal’ in its proper sense, and it is after all a cognate of ‘liberty’, then one must either modify it with ‘classic’ or replace it with ‘libertarian’, thus rendering the word useless.

The same goes for its cognates, such as ‘liberation’. When applied to places like Central Africa, ‘national liberation’ means a transitional stage between colonialism and cannibalism. When applied to much of the ‘former Soviet Union’, it means a shift from de jure to merely de facto Russian control. When applied to Asia, it means Mao, Ho and Kim.

The word ‘conservatism’ suffers as much attrition at the hands of lexical vandals. It’s used in a whole raft of meanings, mostly pejorative, except the real one: desire to preserve everything worth preserving in our civilisation.

Words have always been used as weapons in political jousts, but in the past they tended to be used in their real meaning. Thus a British Liberal in the late 1930s might have found both Winston Churchill and Oswald Mosley reprehensible, but he would have properly reserved the descriptor ‘fascist’ only for the latter. Today’s heirs to that Liberal sling the word at anyone they dislike, hoping that the mud sticks.

The abuse of the word ‘partner’ seems to have nothing to do with politics but, as Thomas Mann once remarked, “all intellectual attitudes are latently political”. Using ‘partner’ to mean spouse or lover is an illustration of that latency.

An assault on family and more generally relations between the sexes is another prong in the same offensive, a systematic effort to bring down Western civilisation, whatever little is left of it. To that end, sex has been taken out of its traditional context of familial or at least romantic interplay and put into that of the sex manual enlarging on the purely mechanical aspects of carnality.

That shift happened in the 1960s, when the war on our civilisation went from a chronic to an acute stage. It was only then, by the way, that church attendance in England dropped like a stone, rather than reducing slowly by tiny incremental steps, as it had been doing for a century or two.

Sexual liberation (another misuse of a political term) was inscribed on the banners of that paedocratic revolution perpetrated for, and largely by, barely postpubescent youngsters at the height of their bubbling gonadic output.

That’s what the poet Philip Larkin meant when writing: “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three”. It didn’t of course. Mechanical copulation free of romantic involvement had always existed, but it was only then that society began not just condoning but actively encouraging what used to be called fornication.

All revolutionaries find traditional, not just amorous, vocabulary wanting. Much of any vocabulary comes from books, and lovers used to talk about one another in the language of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Shelley’s poems, minus the mastery. Such literary sources were now deemed inadequate.

Those youthful revolutionaries needed a different inspiration, and found it in sex manuals. These didn’t talk about spouses, lovers, fair ladies and their swains. They talked about partners, and the word instantly gained the kind of currency it had never had before.

Hence the kind of dialogue I described above wasn’t just an exercise in annoying pedantry. It was a quixotic attempt to spike one gun aimed at the heart of Western civilisation.

Whenever I wax indignant about the depredations of modernity, my pragmatic readers ask the quintessential British question: “What can we do about it?”

Alas, my answer has to be “Not much”. But one thing we can do is refuse to succumb to linguistic assaults on everything we hold dear.

At the risk of social opprobrium, we can use words only in their real meaning, refusing to understand the politically charged patois of modernity. We can continue to use ‘gender-specific’ words, always following a singular antecedent with a singular pronoun. We can even go through the charade of feigning failure to understand pernicious non-words used by woke non-thinkers.

I doubt efforts along those lines can ever save any souls other than our own. Yet even such a limited success is worth having, as my partner Penelope will doubtless agree.