Defund the police is a perfectly good term.

As protests over racial inequality and police violence have characterized much of this summer, so have debates about how we speak and write about those issues. In a recent episode of Lexical ValleyJohn McWhorter explored two themes of linguistic research: the slogan “Defund the police” and the capitalization of Black (and White) persons. Here is a transcript of that segment, edited and condensed for clarity.

Underfunding

Many protests these days say, “Defuse the police.” Many people do not like the shape disburse is being used because you would think that disburse It means that you are supposed to take all the money from the police, so there will be no police force.

However, most people when they say disburse it means that the police should get less money, that the police should be responsible for less things within a society:Less money no Not money. The question you can ask then is: if that’s what people mean, isn’t it imprecise to say “Defund the police”? Shouldn’t we use words according to what they really mean?

In this case, I think we should be a little more subtle on the matter. The prefix Delaware- It is not always absolute. It can also be what a linguist might call scaling. Now it is true that if you dethrone someone, then you are taking their butt off the throne. Down they go, and that’s it. TO dethrone it means leaving the person not on the throne. It is A or B. Or take desegregate. The idea is not to leave a bit of segregation.

But there are other uses of Delaware-. For example, to de-scale. If you think about it, when you say de-scale, what you imagine is to lower the thermometer reading, maybe a lot. But when it does not necessarily mean that you are extinguishing the entire business. It is a matter of degree, bringing something close to half.

Or if you unzip, does that mean it will end up uncompressed to the max? Probably not. It is climbing It is a continuum.

And so, the outlay can mean that too. It could be considered that disbursing does not mean completely depriving someone or something of the funds, but giving them less funds. To the extent that that’s not what most of us were thinking, the truth is, we use language creatively all the time, and that’s another way of saying that language is always changing.

You should also think about the difference between a slogan and a scientific article. Defund the police. At least it makes you imagine that there is no police, and there is something useful in that. Now, I think most of us shudder to imagine that there is no police. That seems too extreme. There are people who would like it that way, but it is an extreme point of view. However, imagining it and then recovering at a midpoint is not the worst thing in the world. And once again, it’s about slogan versus scientific communication.

For example, Black Lives Matter. It is common for some people to say, “No, all lives matter.” They are missing the point. Black Lives Matter does not mean that black lives matter more. It means that black lives also matter. Black lives also matter. However, the slogan assumes you know it and assumes you know it, because what kind of slogan would Black Lives Matter As Well, or even Black Lives Matter be, too? The “too much” type of hangs. It is not a slogan. It is a communication piece. And the two types overlap considerably, but not completely. Everyone is supposed to know that no one would be so crazy or self-centered as to say that black lives matter more. Why does someone want to say that? Of course black lives matter, too, but you don’t say it. And in the same way, imagine now instead of saying, “Defund the police,” you said, “Less money for the police.” That is not a slogan.

There are times when being perfectly accurate is just talking to yourself. And I think that’s what’s going on with disburse. It is a different kind of meaning. The language is always changing, and here it is changing, not in a random way that nobody cares about, like the relatable word to be used, but it is in a heated context. However, this is how the language always changes.

Capitalizing people

The Associated Press and now the New York Times have decided to capitalize on Black when it comes to people. The decision seems perfectly correct to me, because the people we refer to as blacks are certainly not black in the color sense. So if we are talking about black people then it should be treated as a proper name. It means that black is not color, but a set of people who are considered as a set for reasons other than what the word really means in its central definition. You can also say that it refers to a set of historical experiences, not to mention current experiences. And so black should be capital I think. It will set me free to do something I always felt would be natural. I have spent my life where, when I write in black, I think lowercase, even though I feel like I am uppercase and lowercase. It should be capital.

Now, that doesn’t mean that White should it be capitalized too? And yes, because yes. It does so because white is as arbitrary as black when it comes to these things. And then what is a white person? Can Hispanics be white? Israelis are white? What is white is a fairly arbitrary concept. Let’s not even go into why whites are called Caucasians.

And so White It is one thing. It is a historical set of experiences and a modern set of experiences, so it must also be capitalized.

In an ideal world, we would now be capitalizing B for Black and W for white, but we cannot. Unfortunately we cannot because real life has intervened. White Nationalists Already Capitalize White, the idea is to consecrate whiteness as something separate and, in its sense, something preferable to many other things, including Black.

Now I think most of us who are not white nationalists find that use quite distasteful. I think a critical mass of us would rather not do what they do. And so how they use it that way, no, I don’t think we can. It is inconvenient, because they have started to do something, and now the rest of us cannot do it because they got there first. But it would make me uncomfortable to start capitalizing White. Smells like a Confederate flag. So for that reason I would say no, although deep in my bones I wish it was tidy. And if white nationalists cease to exist and 50 years have passed, then I’m going to be here saying, OK, time to capitalize White so that everything is ordered. But we can’t have it ordered now.

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