Importance of Language

It seems to me that one of the reasons that political debate has so degenerated in this country is the use of language as buzzwords where the actual meaning is either obscure or hotly disputed. "Neoliberal" seems to fall into this category.  To me a neoliberal believes in a minimally sized state, as Mrs Thatcher did and George Osborne still does.  To say there is no difference between them and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who drove record levels of increases in public spending especially in the NHS is therefore absurd, and if the people using the word actually thought about its meaning that would be obvious.  Ash Sarker apparently considers herself to be "literally a Communist" although she sounds much more like an anarcho-syndicalist to me.

Incidentally, people seem to have given up on the literal meaning of literal, and simply seem to use it to mean "purely" or "extremely".

Equally "Zionist" to me simply means a Jewish Nationalist essentially no different from people who think that French people are entitled to live in France, Italians in Italy, or indeed Palestinians in Palestine.  Other people seem to get very confused as to whether it means what they regard as a use of force, or whether it is just a random term of abuse.

I see that many people apparently don't know what antisemitism is, i.e. hostility or hatred towards people who are Jewish.  Apparently 40% of people, and a greater proportion of younger people, don't understand the word at all.  Campaigners against antisemitism might well be more successful if they talked more of anti-Jewish hatred rather than antisemitism. 

What puzzles me is how it is that we have higher and wider levels of education and yet people can be so ignorant about quite basic things, and use language quite uncritically.