Lael Ewy

The word “elite” has seen a lot of abuse over the last few decades. 

For liberals, the “elite” are wealthy businessmen who purchase politicians, wreck the schools, and rape (really? Rape?) the planet.

For conservatives, the elite are ivory-tower academics who ruin the minds of children with their radical, sinful, and dangerous ideas.

All of us sense that the status of the elite is undeserved. The ideas is that the rich got there by exploiting others and that intellectuals lack practical knowledge.

The term “fake news” has exploded all over the real news, possibly in order to draw fire away from how the news media has covered falsehoods in the past.

Fake news has been around a long time, though.

Consider the presidential race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Among the slurs the two exchanged, Jefferson’s campaign at one point said Adams had “neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."

A few years ago, the humorist John Hodgman published a book titled The Areas of My Expertise.

The book used irony to skewer the whole notion of expertise, yet the subject matter expert or “SME,” is still the go-to person for journalists and executives alike.

In my own limited experience with being called an expert, it certainly doesn’t feel like anything special.

In fact, it’s kind of scary, because the deeper you get into a subject, the more you’re aware of how little you actually know.

In his call for “extreme vetting,” the president-elect has given the word “extreme” a bit of a comeback.

“Extreme” had a good run in the ‘90s, applied to everything from rock bands to bowling.

And even though the excesses of the 2000s were far greater, we seemed then to have used the word less, almost as if “extreme” was no longer adequate to describe the billions of dollars scammed by complex financial transactions and made-up mortgages.

The term “post-fact world” is gaining frightening currency these days.

The idea here is that facts no longer matter in public discourse, that people can say whatever they want, and if something reinforces what people think, they’ll believe it, no matter the evidence to back it up.

At issue is not just how we communicate with one another, but whether or not language is really able to carry straightforward meaning.

The word “refugee,” though quite well placed in a certain Tom Petty song, has become quite rare.

We get to hear the word “transition” a lot during this season, as we move from summer to fall, and fall to winter. If nothing else, the political scene seems to be making up for any transitions the weather has failed to deliver. But “transition” has gathered a remarkable amount of baggage for a fairly technical, Latinate word.

This past election season, we’ve seen a spate of unfriending. In order for “unfriend” to be a verb, “friend” must also have become one.

To “friend” a person is a function of social media. The process is as simple as clicking a virtual button and sending a request, to be requited or refused in the great digital beyond. Back in ancient times when “friend” was only a noun, this process was much more drawn out. You “befriended” someone, which implies that the onus of beginning the process was on you. Or you “made friends with” someone. You put in the work to build something new.

We tend to use the word “media” somewhat ungrammatically.

It is plural, but we generally reference “the media” as if it’s a single entity and not various different ways of conveying information.

This is curious, since the last few decades have seen a proliferation of new media, each medium failing to completely supplant the last.

Perhaps we lump all media together because the messages we receive from our various sources are largely the same.

I’m not going to argue here that Donald Trump was justified in calling his hot-mic admission of sexual assault “locker room talk.”

Rather, I’m going to suggest that such candid speech is probably necessary.