I’m a Word Inspector. Don’t worry, you’d have never heard of this job. That’s because I invented it. I inspect words that are dying, and I try to bring them back to life. People think words just lose their meanings. I used to think that too. Ages ago, when I would sit in my library, reading forgotten books to life, I remember how some days I would come across phrases that meant absolutely nothing to me. Hollow like shells, only fossils of whatever meaning they once held. ‘The cat’s out of the bag’. Surely this carried some meaning back when cats were abundantly found inside bags. But now saying these words feels like forcing life into something long dead. Sometimes I desperately wish words could indeed just lose their meaning. What’s lost can at least be found.
But meaning isn’t ever just lost. No. Meaning is stolen. ‘Word theft’ I call it. (‘Meaning theft’ isn’t catchy enough.) Meaning is stolen, and before the theft is even discovered, this meaning is butchered and the letters left to bleed on a pavement. There’s, in fact, a word for this barbaric act, much better than ‘butchered’. I can’t quite remember it, and that means only one thing: another word just had its meaning stolen. I guess, it’s time for the Word Inspector to get to work. I’m texting my assistant.
That was quick. She just replied, and my hunch was right. A word theft has indeed occurred. If we make it in the next hour, we might catch the thief and prevent any more damage. Time to hit the road.
Word theft has existed since words have. People rob words of meanings all the time. You see, I don’t think people lie. They just poke the meanings out of words, then fill those hollowed words with their own meanings, to pass off their perceptions of reality as the truth. And if they do it well enough and often enough (when they ‘craft a good lie’), we end up with a word that is now meaningless. Like I just did, with the word lie. I robbed it of its meaning, gave it my own and tried to pass that off as the truth. And you believed me. Look, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, it’s just that you should know how easy it is to plunder a language. We really do need Word Inspectors, trust me.
I’m driving to the village across the highway. There was a distress call from a panicked wife. Her husband is unable to express what he’s feeling, and he’s getting hysterical. This looks like a high-profile theft, ones that happen in a decade, maybe a millenia. Thefts like these have destroyed societies in the past. I clutch the steering wheel tight, hoping they haven’t stolen what I think they have, as I take a left for the village.
You know the oldest theft that ever happened? It’s to the words good and bad. There must have been a time when they meant something. Food smelled good or bad, sunsets looked good or bad, sex felt good or bad. And people acted good or bad. Good and bad were forever in passing, never sticking. But then came religion. Gods were born good. Born holy. Demons were born bad, born evil. Good Gods did bad things. They went to wars, they clamored for glory,, they ordered and judged. But they were Gods, they were good, and so their bads were forgotten. Meanwhile the bad demons did good things. They chased the Gods' wisdoms, they tempted people to eat and sleep, and they made passionate love. But their bad was so inherent, their good was forlorn. Once people were faced with this spectre of contradictions, good and bad were perpetually lost. Religion committed the first word theft, and the course of humanity changed. Civilizations now remain cursed with genocides and heartbreaks, the two most insufferable bads still unleashed for the sake of some abstract goods.
I can see my assistant’s bike in the courtyard. The place is lit with a haunting lamp light. I think she heard my car park, as she’s now come on to the door sill. The way she’s looking at me, that admiration and hope, it scares me. I was never meant to save the world from word thieves.
I was meant to be an unknown librarian in a forgotten town, maybe I still can be once it's all over. (So, never.) I get out of my car, wearing that hollow confidence. “Are we too late?” I ask as I step in. She nods a no. Inside, spread on the floor in a painstruck silence is a man bandaged, bruised, broken. I kneel, take his shivering hand in mine, and ask his wife, “Kya hua inhe?” She looks at him, lost as he tries to speak through quivering lips. “Vo… unhone… Ye vo kiye… ye kiye...” “Kuchh bataiye toh!” his wife demands, holding in a torrent of emotion. He's trying, I wish I could explain. He just can’t find the words… they've been stolen. “Ye kab se hain aise?” “Do din ho gaye sahab! Plaster toh hafte se chadha hai, parso pata nahi kya dekhe news mei. Kuchh ni bole tabse.” As she finishes that sentence, she finally breaks down, hurriedly hiding her helplessness behind her ghunghat.
It was four years ago that I really started paying attention. It was subtle initially, this plunder happening the world over. Looked unintentional, harmless. People were just confused, I thought. Confused between morals and laws, rage and anger, strength and power. Sure, I thought, some people are confusing the nation with the government. Anti-national, they’re calling anyone who criticizes the nationalist man. It’s easy, though dangerous, to confuse words that are moderately similar but radically different.
And then a pattern emerged. There was smoke, but no one bothered to clear the air. They were cashing in on the ashes, if not flaming the fire. The oppressors cried they were the ones oppressed. The rioters claimed to be the harbingers of peace. Opaque party funding was a law for transparency. They attacked the constitution and called it democracy. They jailed students while singing love for dissent. They burnt forests while holding candles for the planet. It was soon clear to me that when the driver was promising us a free ride to the future, what he meant was a dive into the forgotten past, to the times of untruth, uncivilization and unmeaning. And it wasn’t free. We’d pay with everything we’d built and preserved.
Once you notice this plunder, you realize how common this theft has forever been. Five centuries ago, ‘Love the neighbour’ became ‘colonize the uncivil’. Two centuries ago, when the capitalists stole all the means of production, ‘wage slavery’ became the ‘opportunity to work’. A century ago, corporate dictatorship became the free markets, and state dictatorships became communist utopias. Today, the leader of the free world rains bombs on oil-rich nations to forcefully gift them freedom and democracy. The word theft had been going on for ages. What was needed was a word inspector.
Alan Moore has said ideas are bulletproof. But word thieves don’t come with guns. They come with loudspeakers. And they yell lies through them all day, all night. For months you wake up and fall asleep hearing their lies, till it all becomes white noise. Second nature: you breathe air and you hear lies. Do ideas die? Well, are ghosts dead?
“I found it,” she says, hoping she hadn’t. The man lies frothing unknown words on the floor as I replay the news clip he might have been watching that day. Mr Pracharak is standing on a manch in Orange City, addressing the whole country. In his mother tongue, he proclaims, “Such things have never happened in our country... Some people here are trying to defame our society, our religious community and our Samaaj. It is a foreign word, lynching... It does not happen here.” I pause the video. “Ye chot aapko... Koi lynch karne aaye thhe aapko?” With a gasp that brings life back to this house, the man suddenly sits up. He looks into my eyes like they are the only thing in the room. “Haan… Lynch. Lynch hua thha.” He is less face and more tears by now. Lynch, the way he just spoke that word, it looks like he fears he’ll forget the word again.
It makes sense. This was no ordinary word theft. It had been a vulgar attempt to rob a victim of his very language of victimhood. Imagine telling someone you are hungry, only to hear back that’s impossible here because the word has Dutch origins. “Haan. Aap lynch hue thhe,” I tell him. It feels empowering to reclaim the word. We stopped the heist. But now is not the time to cheer.
“Take him to the police, make sure they mention the word ‘lynch’ in his FIR,” I tell my assistant. I’m suddenly thankful for that look of hope and admiration she carries. I need it to get through this life.
I get back to my car. Can’t wait to be snoring in bed.
No matter how many word thefts we bust, the way back home always feels gloomy. Knowing that there are still countless word thieves out there, and we might never be able to stop them feels futile, dystopic, scary. So I’ll tell you a secret today. The one that helps me make this drive less gloomy:
Here’s the thing. I don’t believe the plunderers of language will ever succeed. No matter how mighty they get, their project will fail. You see there’s one word they can never rob of its meaning. One word that even they need to work hard on their thefts. This word gave birth to language, and it will continue keeping language alive. It is the word felt by all life on earth, the word that comes to mind every time our feet leave the bed for the floor. That word is Hope. They can’t steal hope. Everyone has always understood the same thing from hope, even if they never carried a lot of it. Perhaps that’s a testament that all attempts at robbing it have so far failed. Even as making hope meaningless would bring humanity to the thieves’ knees, they’ve failed. So every night after solving a case whenever I’m driving home, I remember what hope feels like. It assures me… the word thief will never win.
It's also what convinced me to become a Word Inspector.
Ohh, and PS: we're hiring!