You're at Liberty to Be Linguistically Free
You're not at liberty to be completely free. It's a shame that more people cannot understand that sentence, but it's becoming clear that even our most respected leaders have lost the ability to understand words and what they truly mean.
This story starts with awareness of a website called definefreedom.com. In this website, many people are asked to define freedom. In reading answers such as Ken Starr's, which reads “Freedom represents and embodies the realization of human dignity in community”, the first problem becomes obvious. It's not a definition.
A definition, by it's very nature, attempts to create a unique phonetic moniker for a concept or group of concepts that can all be put in a unique set. Many of the writers did not do this.
Second, nearly all the people polled answered in socio-political terms. In so doing they made a more important error: they confused freedom with liberty. All liberties are freedoms, but not all freedoms are liberties and confusing the two is serious business.
To be free is to make your will manifest. A truly free person would be omnipotent. Most of us are not free to defy gravity at will, nor are we free to cheat death. It comes for all of us and limits our freedom. I may will to meet the 80th President of the United States, but I am not free to have it happen.
I am free to kill my neighbor, though I am not at liberty to do it. Liberty is defined by what no element of society can make us do or prevent us from doing. I can actually believe in any religion or lack there of that I please, but there are societal sanctions on how I may profess that belief. Those sanctions curtail my liberty.
So why do so many people confuse the two? The likely answer is that 'liberty' cannot serve as an adverb and rarely exists as an adjective. 'Free' can serve as both. In a culture in which Hemmingway's brevity has won the day and no sentence should have more than 7 words and two clauses in it, the very act of describing someone as 'at liberty' strikes against the modern sensibility.
Still, it's sad that people repeatedly make this mistake. It coarsens our politics and leads to the election of increasingly terrifying morons.
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rwdrake) wrote,
discontent
