Mexican Standoff
In the 1990’s, my little company produced marketing materials and user guides for multiple cell phone manufacturers. Those were the days when Bill Clinton ramrodded NAFTA through congress so that every OEM had to produce their user documentation in French, English, and Spanish — a burdensome expense for manufacturers but a boon for small communications companies like mine.

French is a fairly easy language to have translated because the French are so arrogant about their original language and hostile towards dialectic variations. Spanish, on the other hand, is a nightmare. Even worse, since cell phones were relatively new gadgets at the time, user guides were filled with technical explanations not previously translated into Spanish of any dialect.

I approached the task by hiring two translators — one, a native speaker from Mexico and the other, a non-native but highly educated college professor who taught advanced Spanish. On a particular Monday evening with the three of us sitting in my home office, we hit the wall. Both women disagreed with each other so strongly that I expected violence to erupt at any minute.

When two women, fluent in Spanish, cannot agree on the translation and the final vote falls to a white guy whose only Spanish vocabulary — developed over many South-of-the-border vacations — consists of “Más cerveza por favor”, what’s the solution? I punted and had each translator write me a brief explanation of their reasoning. Then, I let the client decide. Call me “pollo” but I was not getting in the middle of that standoff.

Cultural Entropy
When I observe a public speaker addressing a large audience, I visualize a sea of dissonance emanating from that speaker and hovering above the listeners like a fog. American English has become so bastardized that every word spoken undergoes a multitude of mistranslations before entering the audience members’ consciousness. Unlike the French, who are protective of their language, we have allowed every political, philosophical, and religious cult to redefine any words they see fit.

I’m not just talking about the multi-definition words like “Love”. I’m talking about every single word in the English language. The most dangerous assault on our culture comes from the “re-definers” who hijack words and assign their own trendy meaning. It’s cute at first but it becomes a linguistic nightmare when every person maps their own biased definition onto any word that might possibly offend them.

The relativism of the “re-definers” eventually seeps its way into our foundational basis for understanding the World around us. We’re stuck with ignoring ten thousand years of written history and scientific study for the sake of protecting a few fragile egos. Unquestionably, knowledge evolves but when we begin assigning alternate meaning to the words that describe that knowledge, simply because we find the original meaning inconvenient, we’re headed for the new dark ages.

Perhaps you think I’m a stiff old curmudgeon, stuck in the past. Convince me. I’m open to whatever you have to say. I’ll buy the coffee, but don’t try to dazzle me with emotionalist, feel-good BS. Show me some hard, rational facts that have survived the scrutiny of time and the scientific method. I’ll even define exactly what I meant by that last sentence.

A meeting of great minds who think alike