If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at hand:

News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs about George Washington’s slaves.

It was pointed out to me that many people try to avoid using the word slave. A person is not a slave in the same way a doctor is a doctor. It’s a demeaning usage, best to be avoided. Avoiding it might be a positive example of what many people think of as political correctness.

But as I revised the sentence, something rose up into view in the language there. News comes from Philadelphia that the federal government wants to take down historic signs . . .

. . . about people George Washington enslaved. (Too vague. He was president and therefore participated in the country’s enslavement of many thousands of people.)

. . . about individual people George Washington enslaved. (Better, I think, but the above political interpretation may still be present, not sure.)

. . . about individual people George Washington himself enslaved. (Best of the four wordings. The man Washington enslaved particular individuals known to him.)

When we speak or write, certain words and phrases come quickly to mind. These maybe be ready-made with general meanings, kind of like making a sauce with a can of cream of mushroom soup. There may be newer and better alternatives, words that have been scrutinized and screened, but still essentially ready-made, pre-packaged with meanings others have chosen. And there may be wordings we’ve worked up ourselves as we reflect on what we’re saying or on what we’ve drafted. In this process, we have a chance to discover and express something more vivid and precise. If we are thinking on our feet as we write or speak, not scooping ready-mades from a can of inherited language, we can surprise ourselves. I know I was surprised to see how much more meaningful and powerful the fourth version of that sentence was than the first.

Books about writing well might give a technical analysis. It could go something like this:

They were slaves. Here is a noun used for a category of human beings. In our own sentence, let’s put those people in that category.

They were enslaved. Here is a process verb that applies in this case. It’s in the passive voice, which means that the verb is agnostic about who carried out the action. Only the recipient of the action, the victim of the action, is considered in this form of verb. A car was parked right by the fire hydrant.

This man enslaved those people. Our society sanctioned his actions. Here the verb changes to the active voice. The recipient of the action, the victim, remains clear, but now the actor is featured prominently in both the grammar and the meaning. The sentence names both the responsible party and the victim. Even though I called 9-1-1, because my idiot neighbor parked his car in front of the fire hydrant, his house burned to the ground.

In personal life and in political life, we have to make the effort to name things accurately. To do the work to speak clearly about actions and responsibilities.

Yes, Mom, I see that the cookie jar has been emptied.

Yes, fellow citizen, we do see that the democracy has been hollowed out.

________

PS. Other parts of language can be refined and clarified like this, too. We do not have to accept the sloppy generality of familiar phrases. For example, just above, I tried two versions of a sentence:

We have to make an effort to name things accurately. 

We have to make the effort to name things accurately. 

They don’t mean quite the same thing, do they? Do they express different levels of urgency, perhaps, or hope?

When I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, for maybe half the semester one professor would come to class each day and write pairs and trios of very, very similarly worded sentences on the chalkboard, and we would work together to extract the different shades of meaning. In a painting, sometimes this gray is a little moodier than that gray, and sometimes that matters . . .

When a journalist refers to Public Law 119-21 as the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, that's repeating a political slogan uncritically, needlessly, and doing political advertising for free. Public Law 119-21 began life as H. R. 1 during the 119th Congress, and it was signed into law by the President on July 4, 2025, so no hint of politics there, eh? The name One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act was removed from the legislation before it passed in the Senate, so in terms of law the name is irrelevant. But for purposes of propaganda and political sloganizing, the name lives on. Thanks to journalists, it comes back into view quite often.

This is an example of journalists making propaganda easy for politicians.

In Death of a Salesman, as a working person’s life is falling to pieces, the one closest to him says, “Attention must be paid!” A 1999 review of the play’s revival interprets the line this way: “When people hurt as Willie does, it is inhuman to look away.” And for the duration of the live performance, the audience accepts that responsibility, I guess.

At the end of Brassed Off, a movie about a coal mining community’s struggles, at last the town’s band wins a music competition, and the band leader speaks to the audience about the impossibility of getting the wider world to pay attention to the ongoing destruction of their community. He devises a brief gesture that will might allow them momentarily to be heard, or not. After all, he points out, other concerns already fill the airwaves, the hearts and minds of the country. No way, it seems, to compete with all that noise.

Attention must be paid, but it may not be.

And drive across town or across the state, you see places where plainly there is great need and peril. Surely attention must be paid, but it may not be.

The information economy, the attention economy, the entertainment economy, the propaganda machinery, drowns out, distracts, and overwhelms. Structurally, proper, ethical, humane, civic-minded attention is out of reach. We're out of practice and it's out of reach.

Praise for a user document created by the Gemini large language tool reminds me that I haven’t run my private test on ChatGPT or its buddies lately. My test involves asking questions of some complexity about things that I am very knowledgeable about, evaluating the answer, and also seeing what it takes to get a more refined answer from the tool.

The clear, helpful user doc reminds me of my conclusion from earlier runnings of my private test, which was that the AI tool was skillful in creating brief texts organized as bullet lists or numbered steps. 

Certain kinds of information are well-served in those formats. Other topics can’t burst out of the numbing simplicity of a clearly organized five-paragraph high school theme unless they have a different structure.

I should ask ChatGPT to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the 5-paragraph theme structure and see what happens.

PS. If you have any questions about what’s mind-numbing about 5-p themes, locate a hundred of them and read them in a row. Or maybe ask ChatGPT to write you a hundred and read those, I don’t know.

I was in a building talking by cell phone, but my reception was poor. The fellow on the other end of the call said, “Walk toward a window.” Go to where cell phone waves move freely through the air.

The same goes for free speech. On the web, Dave Winer urges us to do the equivalent of walking toward a window. Walk out of the silo, go to where free speech moves freely through the air. He writes:

One of the things we can do to preserve freedom is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us who communicate outside, the more people will be attracted. Your participation helps draw people out, where independent developers can create new tools for you without waiting for permission of big companies who own the network you're using. It's like voting. The more people do it, the stronger we all are.

The principle here is far-reaching, not just for the web —

1. Behave as though a narrow space designed by others for their purposes, not yours, is good enough for you, and you signal that to the wider group: “This narrow space is good enough for you, too!”
2. Behave as though you should be free, that you are free to move freely, speak freely in a space that suits you, and you signal to the wider group that they deserve the same opportunities. “We deserve an open space for creativity, freedom, and partnership, and we shall have it. Maybe we already do.”

When we see a group of people living in creativity, freedom, and partnership over there, we tend to say, “Let’s go over and see if we can join in.” We say, “We’ll have what they’re having!”

When, asserting our principles, we put down a marker asserting our own individual freedom, that marker and those principles create a little better chance for the other person’s freedom too.

Vaclav Havel wrote about living in truth. Think carefully about what you really value, and live as free as you can in the powerful truth of it. Doing so will inspire your friends and neighbors toward their own freedom and it will drive the power-hungry in their towers a little bit crazy. This was part of what he called the power of the powerless.

 “Let the web be the web,” writes Dave Winer. Its real, specific, far-reaching virtues [imagined in substantial part from the very start by Tim Berners-Lee] —  know them, name them, let them continue to unfold for us. Yes, yes, yes.

But actually, Dave Winer said, “We let the web be the web.” Understanding the web, naming its virtues and its promise, is work we have to do together. No Silicon Silomaster or Guru Gazillionaire can be trusted with the task. People ordinarily seem powerless, but people together are the only ones for this important work.

When a project needs to be solved in the realm of shared, evolving, open practices rather than being abandoned to heavy-handed, pattern-dictating operations of someone else’s capital, people together are the ones for the task. When Vaclav Havel wrote about the power of the powerless, he wasn’t kidding.

With good tools and a taste for creativity and freedom, it’s people who put the we in web.

Americans who are not apolitical still tend to think about politics in terms of the current crisis and the upcoming election. On the average, we don't have a ready grasp, I believe, on a realistic timeline for our political challenges. The toolkit of activism that has a chance for success requires voting, but much more.

It's not hard to see that political action that might change the quality of life is the work of generations. 

See, for example, the United States section in the eight hour day/forty hour work week article on Wikipedia. Here we see that early episodes in the struggle took place in the 1790s and 1830s, continued steadily for decades, and even after the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act the struggle has continued. For example, some employers have sought to avoid labor law standards by renaming employees as independent contractors, thereby seeming to grant themselves exemptions to aspects of established labor protection. After more than two centuries, the work goes on.

Powerful people know that any faddish activism will soon blow away in the breeze. No need for the powerful to pay much attention to activism that doesn't look ready for the very long haul. For the work of a generation, for starters.

Resist much, obey little, wrote Walt Whitman in "To the States," a three-line poem he placed near the start of his life-long collection of poems, Leaves of Grass. Why? Because, Whitman said, once liberty has been stolen or crushed, no nation ever wins it back. True? I don't know, but it must be true that the recovery, if possible, will be lengthy and hard-won.

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

I suppose there are people who on their deathbed find themselves thinking, "I wish I had asked fewer questions, I wish I had resisted less and obeyed more." Who are these people, though?