Watch Out For Bad Language

This began as an ettiquette article about bad language. I noticed on various blogs that the comments of angry feminists contained a lot of foul words. And then, I discovered something even worse: how normal words were being used to make women at home feel that what they were doing was not normal. Feminist teachings in colleges use history as their foundation, saying that while women "used to be" subservient and "had to be" at home, that now they had more "freedom" and "privileges" and "rights.
Women at home have a strong influence on husbands and children, which they ought not to shrink from using. In both advertising and politics, words can be used in a sneaky and clever way to win a person's mind over to a way of thinking. Language can be used for good or ill, and so a woman must be alert to the sly wrangling of language that subverts the family and the culture. These words invade the home through television, the movies, the newspapers, the radio, and the web. College students return home with a "new vision" of how life should really be, and try to change the order of life according to the things they have been indoctrinated with. Language usage changes from doing what is the responsible thing to do, to following another agenda.

Bad language even employs noble words, like "responsible," and "duty," or "noble" and "right." Through various media you are being told that it is responsible to get a job and put in 8 hours a day because you are bearing the burden with your husband.

I've seen advertising for dish soap that sounded more like a religious worship service, than a commercial. There were choir singers in the background, and words like "joy," "love," and "renewed." Obviously, certain companies know that it is a great advantage to them to win the business of Christians. Using words that we all identify with, is a great advantage.

But let me get back to my point about bad language. What I call "weasel words," are those which we often overlook, when we find ourselves persuaded to a different doctrine than the one set forth so clearly in the scriptures for women. Let me not be misunderstood: women have always been free to do as they wanted, and there were women who sold things and women who were in politics, and women who did other things besides home living. There were also the wild women with evil influences who came to no good end.

But what is happening today is very subtle. The people who want society to become more socialistic and Marxist are using our words and our beliefs, to slyly twist the understanding of things. "In the past," they say, women were "oppressed," and "now, you have a choice." Look carefully at how these phrases are used to make you believe something that is false. In the past, were all women truly oppressed, and did all women have no choice whatever?

History, the Bible, and later history does not bear this out at all. Women have always had a choice. Yet today many young women in Western society do not realize they have the choice of being wives and homemakers, and that they don't have to compete for jobs and fight with men in the workplace. Feminists have used the schools for many years to send their message, which is not one of choice. Go into the high schools and ask if there is an opportunity to learn about marriage, home and family, and if there is anyone teaching the boys and girls of this life in a positive sense. The history books are now so revised and so askewed, that they don't even show the success of the Biblical, time worn and time proven pattern of the home and the family, with the women guiding the home.

I keenly recall talking to a high school girl who told me about the job fair that her school had promoted. She had gone to all the different tables and booths and collected a large bag of free literature showing all the opportunities that were available to women. I asked her, "Was there a Homemaker table?" and she said "No," so I said, "Why ever not?" and she replied, "Because that is not a real job." Well you see dear ladies, they used that bad language again. Not a "real job." I then talked to her about how unbalanced and unfair it was that they did not have a table or booth with someone showing the girls how they could become homemakers and have a greater hand in the destiny of men and children. I spent a lot of time talking to her about this, and in a short time it was reported to me that she married and engaged in the full time job of taking very good care of him and their first home.

Another way that language is misused is through twisting scripture, which I call "Twisted Scripture." In this instance, the progressives change the Proverbs 31 woman, the Titus 2 Model, and the 1 Timothy 5:14 example, to mean that women worked outside the home and became super women who never got exhausted and who made things constantly, planted huge fields, were in the real estate business and sat in markets all day to sell their crafts.

I heard an inspirational speaker in a church speaking to a group of women about liberation. "This is not the 1950's anymore," she said. "Girls, no one is going to take care of you all your life. You have to get a job and work." Yet sadly she left out the alternatives--that of carefully monitoring the family income and investing it so that she would bring in more income and not have to leave the home. The stress that many women are coping with is such that they are often resorting to pharmacueticals and psychiatric drugs to keep them going. This speaker did not mention any of the side effects of women having to be providers. She would have done well to have introduced a divorced woman who was forced to provide, and have her tell the real story.

Even preachers will say that Bible women were so involved in commerce, and stretch the description of them to the point that it justifies sending their wives to work. They do this through the bad use of language, just like the progressives do in politics and the feminists do in their speeches and publications.

Bad language twists words like "privilege" and "opportunity" and "rights" to mean now you have the right to do what the progressives, the social planners, and those who think they have a better plan, want you to do.

It is amazing, isn't it, that it took the 20th century, and now the 21st century progressives to discover, after all this time, that the Proverbs 31 woman and the Titus 2 woman and the I Timothy 5:14 woman was not really a homemaker or a wife--she was really into commerce. How is it that this era is so much more enlightened than all time before it? How is it? Dictionaries have changed the meanings of words. Bibles are revised with modern language, the excuse being that we can't understand the old English or the old language. (We're too stupid, I guess).

Now, you cannot even read the Bible without coming to their conclusions, because modern versions use bad language. One woman asked me, "Why do you say parents should teach their children, when that verse says "talk to your children." I pointed out that the original Hebrew language used the word "teach," which meant "discipline," which meant "to follow," where we get our word "disciple." She discovered that she was using a modern version that did not use the original Hebrew translation. There is a big difference, then, in teaching someone, and in merely talking. The bad language in the modern version changed the sense of the passage quite a bit. No wonder we are all so confused. Bad language is something you really have to watch out for.

Other words in our world are "better," and "improved." It astonishes me that even the new preachers think that modern man has discovered something about how women should live, even though men centuries before, never reached that conclusion. Now women can have "improved" lifestyles, no longer restricted to marrying someone for a lifetime; now they have the privilege of quitting whenever they want to and moving on to the next guy. Were the people in past centuries who built up civilization all wrong, and are we so much smarter just because we have references and computers and can get more information? You would think we would be wiser, but unfortunately, a lot of that language has been changed, and the meaning of words changed, so that it portrays a completely different scene. Do they mean to tell us that no one knew what was really good for women until the 20th century? That our great grandmothers and great great grandmothers and the pioneers and the Victorians were all really in the dark, wrong, misguided, and stupid?

If you are home, or wanting to come home, don't listen to all this bad language. If you don't think you can trust what anyone is telling you, have a look into the past, if you can find anything that has not been revised with weasel words and fictional descriptions, and see how women really lived. The best source is our own grandmothers and great grandmothers. Have a look at their pictures and notice how they dressed, how they wore their hair. Notice the things around them. Find out from their letters and diaries what they believed and what they did. We recently connected a set of embroidered pillowcases that we had, with our grandmother's diary. She wrote an entry that said, "Worked on the purple pillow cases today." Now we know that they were a work of her own hands. We are able to see how she lived from day to day. There is no mention in these diaries of having to fight her way in the workplace and watching out for unfair treatment. She was at home, in charge of everything. She was at the top.

I have even read a copy of my great-great grandmother's story of pioneer days. While she complained of a storm that had destroyed part of the place that they lived, and that she had not had word from her husband, who was across the river before it flooded, there was none of this "unfair" and "oppressed" business between the men and the women. They were obviously doing the best they could under the circumstances, and both husband and wife were enduring the suffering of the storm and the flood. She was left home with the children because it was safer than having to go across the river to find work. In the end, it was the man who was the most put upon and who endured the most danger. I suppose modern feminists would say that it took the 20th century radical feminists to free women of the oppression of being left protected at home while the husband went to work. Even the men in our society are to a large extent influenced by bad language. The young ones are especially vulnerable to the feminist message, as it has been portrayed as an advantage to them to have their wives working: more money. Modernists may say that the man should have stayed home and let the woman cross the river and look for work.

Using bad language is like taking someone's favorite ice cream and trying to persuade them to buy something bitter and ugly in its place. Simply say that it is too bad they have to put up with such an inferior product, but now they don't have to eat that horrid stuff any more. In the past, it was all they had, and there was no choice, but now, they can be liberated to eat this other ice cream, which is better. It is all in the language.

Looking At Drawingsby Adolfo Belimbau (this is from a previous century. If women were so deprived of knowledge and learning, I wonder why so many artists depicted them reading and writing.)