How to beat the cis-culture by making up prog-words

The People's Blog

"Technological innovations have brought us many new words. We need new words not only to identify new things, but also to rename some of the old things in order to avoid confusion. For example, people have been playing the guitar for centuries without calling it "acoustic" until the electric guitar entered the stage; that's when the old guitar was retroactively renamed into acoustic. Traditional clocks with a face and rotating hands were retroactively renamed "analog" to distinguish them from "digital," along with displays, signals, recordings, and so on. The new words for such retro-naming are called retronyms.

"Innovations in social engineering affect our language in much the same way. 

"When Karl Marx laid out his blueprint for communism and socialist ideas began to engulf Europe, the normal way of doing business was retroactively renamed "capitalism." Rational behavior became "oppressive" and people who preferred normalcy to "isms" became apologists for a reactionary socio-economic ideology. The advent of communist propaganda caused any non-communist discourse (e.g., Adam Smith) to be retroactively known as "capitalist propaganda."

"In the U.S., the advent of progressivism in the 1930s caused a retroactive renaming of mainstream believers in the American Revolution into "conservatives." When the progressives decided to call themselves "liberals," the real liberals renamed themselves "classical liberals." 

"The general rule is that when new things become mainstream, the existing things have to give way and move to the margins, sometimes under new names. This is a natural order of things. But here's the kicker: what if this change can be induced artificially, with a trick of the eye, by pretending there is a vibrant new mainstream when there really isn't? Can we retro-name and marginalize the undesirable people and things ahead of time, pending a viable alternative? Can we popularize a futuristic media illusion that there is a better progressive reality, and retro-name the existing reality into something old-fashioned and not worth saving? Yes we can! " . . .