The Colonization of Language

Ran into an interesting tweet this morning, courtesy of Netroots Nation 2015.

The death of the bees is a sign that colonizing women, people of color, marginalized communities is not sustainable, says Jess X. Chen #NN15

— Katie Hegarty (@HegartyKatie) July 19, 2015

This is a beautiful example of the Gaia Theory, in which the earth is worshipped like a pagan deity. Gaia communicates her distress via coded signals apparent to the Brahmins and Druids of our neo-priestly caste. Jess X. Chen has divined that the "colonization" of women and other protected classes is unsettling to Gaia. Not only that, but Gaia has chosen to destroy bees to tell us (using scientific methods to determine that the cause of colony collapse disorder looks to be a class of pesticides is not useful to her followers, and is avoided).

Anyway, whenever the word "colonize" is used, it evokes two complementary meanings in my mind. The primary connotation is that of a group of people getting in ships, sailing to a foreign land, and appropriating the resources. The British Empire's subjugation of India is an example.

A deeper connotation comes from the natural world, where countless examples exist. To take just one, consider Africanized bees, also known as "killer bees." This species was introduced to Brazil in the 1950's. It steadily expanded its territory by cross-breeding with European bees, and arrived in North America in 1985.

In either case, colonization is a natural process, in which a strong group overcomes a weaker one. It is one of the ways that Nature selects stronger, fitter species for survival. That fact is too hurtful to many. If Katie Hegarty was a blogger 50,000 years ago, she would be tweeting that the ice age was a sign from Gaia that homo sapiens are colonizing native neanderthal populations, and it is hurting Gaia's feelings.

The word "colonization" has increasingly taken on negative connotations, as evidenced by Chen's quote. The etymology of the word colonize is from the word "to inhabit." The Merriam Webster Dictionary has a neutral definition of "colonize," either 1) to establish a colony, 2) to send illegal or irregularly qualified voters into, and 3) to infiltrate with usually subversive militants for propaganda. The last two seem gratuitous. But not as gratuitous as the third definition in the Google search results, which claims that to colonize means to "appropriate a domain for one's own use."

A definition as elastic as that is necessary to aggregate political power. It can be said that language is a domain, and as thus, it can be colonized. Consider the attempt by Cortes to decimate the language of the Aztecs. Something similar is happening right now. Hard copy dictionaries are being replaced by Wikipedia and online sources. The editorial staff at Wikipedia is effectively determining the mother tongue that will be used by Western Civilization, from now on.

And no discussion of colonization would be complete without noting who is actually appropriating women, people of color, and marginalized communities. The Democratic Party. An individual woman making a private decision to offer her body for compensation on Craigslist is more problematic than entire populations being colonized into a political system, apparently.