 You know, I used to burn my initials into all my stuff with a soldering iron, but I don't know if it's really my thing anymore. I'm thinking about rebranding. If you hang out with children of a certain age, you may notice that they'll sometimes invent new words for things. It's not guacamole, it's green butter, it's not a cartwheel, it's a starfish circle, it's not a restaurant, it's a dinner store. Pointing new terms for established ideas can be cute when children do it, but it can also be an annoying feature of marketing campaigns. Rebranding some well-established technology and then insisting that it's something new and exciting just because the name is different. The Juicero was advertised as the world's first at-home cold-pressed juicing system and it's the juice dispenser. Ride-sharing tech companies like Uber and Lyft are taxi services. Some trying to sell you on co-living strategies to reduce housing costs and disrupt real estate markets would be disappointed if you successfully connected their brilliant new idea to the word roommates. The deliberate reinvention of terminology is pretty distinct from the natural evolution of language over time. Every era has its own slang. Words like thou or yeet in styles of speech are added and dropped from common use all the time. But when someone intentionally snubs a word that accurately communicates an idea in favor of some neologism, there are really two options. Either the speaker doesn't know that there's already a term for the idea, as with the dinner store, or their goal is something other than communication. In the case of marketing hype, the goal is to get you excited about handing over your money for a new-fingled product that isn't actually a new-fingled at all. But there are also more insidious ways to wield novel terminology. In his book, Language and Control, linguists Roger Fowler and colleagues investigate numerous ways that the structure of language can be harnessed for political objectives, a field of study that has become known as critical discourse analysis. We're all familiar with the use of words to argue and convince people of certain ideas, but Fowler is after something deeper, how the way we talk can constrain or reinforce how people think about those ideas. A classic example is the use of passive voice to conceal agency, to make some event read like an accident rather than a deliberate action. The sentence, five milligrams of nicotine were administered to each test subject might be logically equivalent to the sentence, I injected each mouse with five milligrams of nicotine, but they feel very different. They draw our attention to different aspects of the situation. A person who cares about animal rights might not even realize that the first sentence means a person is harming animals, and we wouldn't be surprised if, in order to avoid pissing off those sorts of people, researchers in fields that require hurting animals might develop a stylistic preference for the passive voice. Fowler asserts there are similarly subtle forces at work in the renaming of stuff that already has perfectly adequate terminology, a practice he dubs, re-lexicalization, derived from the term lexicalization, meaning inventing completely new words to fill out a lexicon. Fowler asserts that re-lexicalization can be used to control the landscape of the conversation, establishing a one-way flow of information from the renamer to their intended audience, dictating the framework of categories and concepts that should be admitted to the discussion. He cites a trial of 15 political dissidents who insisted that because they didn't recognize the authority at the court, they should be referred to as observers of the trial, not the accused or defendants. Of course, despite the fact that what you call a group of people on trial doesn't really seem like it should matter, the court categorically rejected their request. When local newspapers reported on the event, they put observers in big ironic quotation marks to make sure nobody got the impression that this was an appropriate term. That might seem like a silly pedantic word game, but if the court or the paper were to allow these people to rebrand themselves as observers, it would open up a whole can of worms, giving ground to a conceptual framework controlled by the people in the courtroom. Letting the new word into the court record would come with a whole set of questions and possibilities that weren't there when they were just defendants. Is the court's authority legitimate? What exactly is happening in this trial, justice or performance? For Fowler, subbing in new terminology for existing words can also be a mechanism for an authority to accumulate even more power through ambiguity. Contracts written in impenetrable legal leads, Byzantine legislation and incomprehensible corporate bureaucracy all command a great deal more power than they claim by inventing new classes and categories that are pretty close to words we already have, but just different enough to make anyone who didn't come up with the rules nervous that they might be misinterpreting something. Is the property I'm trying to sell free and clear? Do my expenses really qualify as out of pocket? Am I absolutely sure I have a verified premium plus membership? Better not make too many waves. Keep your head down and hope you're not breaking any rules. Relexicalization can also be corrosive to the development of knowledge. Sometimes there's a significant problem with technical terminology that is good cause for some renaming. Maybe a term's not specific enough. Maybe there's confusion caused by how much it sounds like a different term. But sometimes, well, in 1994, diabetes researcher, Mary Tai, published a paper titled A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves, where she detailed the method for estimating the area under a curve by drawing regular trapezoids, finding their areas, and adding them up, a technique she dubbed Tai's formula. If you've taken an intro to calculus class, you might recognize Tai's formula as the trapezoidal rule, an approach to estimating area that has been in use since ancient Babylon. Tai's paper has been cited almost 500 times. Some of those citations are commentary. Some are in it for the meme. But a not-insignificant number of scientists have published papers making use of Tai's formula. You might say, well, what's the big deal? If it's the same method, if people can use it to solve their problems, who cares what it's called? Well, to answer that, let's talk about librarianship for a second. There are several standards like the Library of Congress subject headings dedicated to creating controlled vocabularies, a narrow set of judiciously chosen terms used to index and organize the literature in a way that makes it easy to know where to look for information on a particular subject. The list of headings is tightly controlled because any redundancy or overlap would arbitrarily separate books dealing with the same subject, leading to ambiguity and confusion. It's the same deal with Tai's re-lexicalization of the trapezoidal rule. There's an enormous body of literature going back thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of rigorous academic works detailing every trick, every pitfall, every nook and cranny of the thing. If you go looking for some insight into the trapezoidal rule, you'll find a ton of useful information. If you go looking for insight into Tai's formula, you'll find her paper and not much else. Continuity of terminology is important if we want to be able to find and build on prior knowledge rather than simply renaming it every few decades. At the intersection of political and indexical in the Venn diagram of inappropriate re-lexicalization, there's a particularly troublesome sort of renaming intended to cultivate amnesia for an idea's history, to rebrand something and in so doing, divorce it from its inconvenient past. Sometimes that's just a business strategy, as with the hype engine trying to convince us that co-living is definitely an exciting development that will shake up real estate and it's definitely not saddled with all the drawbacks and troublesome implications of roommates. Some academics will rename a philosophical tradition or ideology in order to advocate for it while sidestepping historic problems and critiques. People may have pointed questions if you lobby for utilitarianism, full stop, but they might just nod along with you if you push your ideas as scientific morality, which you define as being like utilitarianism, but better, without the icky bits. In these sorts of scenarios, the people re-lexicalizing these concepts are both establishing a new framework where they get to decide what is and is not part of the new conceptual landscape and to sever the ideas from any existing body of knowledge, either by omission or by insistence that they are in fact different. It's a clever way to both take credit for any good ideas from that history of thought and avoid talking about any of the problems. Inventing new words and new senses of old words is an important and useful activity. It would be petty to deny Zoomers their capskin stand or drips, simply because these words have some linguistic precedent. But I think there's an important distinction to be made between the constant irrepressible evolution of language and the strategic or negligent renaming of ideas. Even if we stop short of the semi-mystical power that's sometimes ascribed to names and naming, the reasons people might have for coining new terms and coercing, demanding, or enforcing their use over old ones may warrant careful consideration. Sometimes, re-electricalization can be justified. People can have good reasons for deliberately retiring old words, but I think it's a practice that should be justified rather than simply allowed without comment, especially if someone's trying to charge $125 for the world's first private pop-up space suitable for all your relaxation needs. Tent. It's a tent. Can you think of any examples of someone inventing new terms because the old ones are inconvenient or unknown to them? Does it say anything that it took me two weeks of research to figure out what this phenomenon is called? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to bubble, subscribe, and share, and don't stop thunking.