We live in a world in which the word “literally” now literally means the opposite of what it means, so it is not surprising that words are constantly misused. However, the ways in which they are misused can be instructive. The New York Times published a story this morning about the Western land issue that has supposedly led the nutcases to occupy federal land in Oregon. I’ll remark only in passing that if the group were composed of left leaning types, we wouldn’t be reading such stories at all. The article itself is not totally awful, though it nonetheless is a reward of sorts to a group that has taken up arms against the government and is just one of many that has earnestly and often sympathetically explored the grievances of these criminals.
The article was reprinted in the Boston Globe. You can read it here. What you won’t see at the link is the headline that appeared in the print edition: Pitch to reclaim land appeals to some in West.
Words do have meanings, and I mean that literally. At least in a newspaper, some effort should be made to use them with precision. In this context, the word “reclaim”, according to my unabridged dictionary, means: to claim back; demand the return of as of right, and so forth. It was probably (hopefully) unintentional, but the person who wrote that headline was implicitly conceding a point to these assholes that lacks any historical basis. The land in question was never theirs in the first place, nor did it belong to the several states in which it is located. Those states were federal territories before they were states. The federal government could grant statehood on any condition it wished. The land in question was reserved to the federal government, as the government had every right to do, and let us give thanks to the non-existent God that it did, or it would be wasteland right now. It cannot, therefore, be “reclaimed”. The headline implies that the land was somehow taken from someone who now wants it back. If the folks holed up in Oregon were Native Americans, the word might be properly employed, but so far as I’m aware, they are not advocating the return of the West to its original occupants. There have probably been instances in which words have been misused in a way favorable to some person or group on the left; I just can’t think of any offhand.
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