I was called a rather vile, anatomical name on Facebook the other day by someone who disagreed not only with my political tendencies, but with my indirectly correcting one of the misspellings in his post. (That’s one of the side effects of being an English major.)

My first reaction was that I would much rather be called nasty names by someone who didn’t know me than by someone who did. All the poster knew about me was that we disagreed. If it had been someone who knew me, I would have probably spent time doing some sort of Woody Allen thing trying to decide whether he was right or not.

My second reaction was that words used to mean something, but that they have succumbed to the same deflation of value that the dollar has. The dollar today, by the way, is worth about 12% of the dollar that I earned when I graduated from college. And being called an SOB or A**hole gets maybe 12% of the reaction it would have gotten back then. Maybe less.

Back then it would have resulted in a fist fight or worse.

We used to our words seriously. Today, at best, we throw them around with just a remnant of their actual meaning. At worst, they are converted into Newspeak, a la 1984. In the former category we have words like “patriot,” “hero,” and—in some circles—“Christian.” In the latter category, a good example is the War Department going away in 1947 and becoming the Department of Defense in 1949. Since then we’ve been in a number of armed conflicts, some more understandable than others. Putting aside those that were arguably justified by treaties, we have defended ourselves in my lifetime by invading Panama, Grenada, and Iraq. Another example Newspeak is the “sound science” movement which was more anti-science than anything else, as well as the name of almost every PAC.

Somewhere along the way we’ve fallen into the Humpty Dumpty mode of linguistics, which is “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.”

And not often enough is there an Alice to say: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Consequently, the default answer to Alice’s question is “Sure.”

Take the word “patriot,” for instance. In the dictionary it means someone who’s willing to stand up for their country, who is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors. In grade school I learned that Patrick Henry was a patriot, along with a bunch of other guys. They risked what they had to create a nation.

Flash forward 200 years and a self-declared “patriot,” is standing in front of a county courthouse with AR-15 protesting the proposed construction of a Mosque. It’s hard to understand in a country that prides itself, sometimes correctly, on freedom of religion how someone who is attempting to prevent it can be a patriot.

Those of us who disagreed with the invasion of Iraq were called unpatriotic. Those who wore an American flag on their lapel were called patriotic. It’s considered patriotic to scream “love it or leave it,” but unpatriotic to call attention to the fact that we are not living up to our ideals.  We have at some point redefined patriotism as simple slogans, easy acts, and a bullying posture. It seems that patriot has devolved to mean “anybody who sees our country the same way I do.”

I like Hamilton Fish’s statement: If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.

The definition of “hero” got a lot ink when Donald Trump decided that John McCain was not a hero. He was captured, and the Donald said that he likes people who weren’t captured. Putting aside the inanity of that remark, if all that McCain had done was get captured, he wouldn’t be a hero. Heroism has to do with what someone does, not what was done to them. However, McCain refused to take the easy way out when the North Vietnamese discovered that they had captured an admiral’s son. He refused to be a propaganda tool for them, and it cost him dearly. That, in my opinion, made him a hero.

Some heroes are easy to pick out. Audie Murphey was a hero. He won 33 awards and medals and was, in my opinion, a much better hero than actor. Other heroes are less obvious and more personal. My dad was a hero to me, especially after I was grown, because then I recognized that he had gotten up every day and worked to support his family and had tried to instill good values in us. He, like McCain, could have probably found an easier way, but he didn’t.

On the other side is the female soldier who was wounded in Iraq, rescued by a squad of her fellow soldiers, and returned home to a hero’s welcome. Based on the newspaper reports, I couldn’t figure out why she was a hero; the soldiers who rescued her might well have been.

Then there’s the toughest one of all: Christian. I’ve never spent a lot of time worrying about whether I was a hero; I can’t think of anything I’ve done that would qualify as heroic. However, I have spent a good deal of time worrying about whether I was really being a Christian.

There is a whole bunch of organizations who call themselves Christian and spew hate, but they haven’t been successful in hijacking the word. There’s still something strange about someone in a white sheet and hood holding a Bible. Most of the sane world understands that’s not Christianity (as we should understand that blowing people up is not Islam).

Within the population that we might consider sane, there are a number of definitions of “Christian,” some as circular as “someone who adheres to Christianity.” A more actionable definition is that Christian means “a follower of Christ.”   And if we take that seriously, we find that a lot of what’s labeled “Christian” is really something else.

For instance, Christianity that teaches the “Prosperity Gospel” doesn’t fit the Christ who didn’t have a place to lay his head.

The Christianity that shuts others out, whether they be gay, Muslim, other denominations, or nonbelievers, doesn’t fit the Christ who went into mobs to preach. You didn’t need your ticket punched by anybody to listen to him.

And those who say we should let thousands die because of the possibility that some few might be a risk to us are not following the Christ who put His own life at risk so that we might have life.

Based on the accounts in the New Testament, Christians are not exclusive, not defensive, and not worshipping for the money.

I’d like to see all three of these words—patriotism, heroism, and Christian—be restricted to their narrower meaning, to be something we both understand and aspire to.

And, as for the words that started this rambling, I’d like for them to eliminated from common currency so that when they are used they deliver the emphasis that they used to. There was a time when obscenities and curse words carried force.

Now, it’s just another A**hole blathering.