Vocab Against Fascism

The most powerful tool against authoritarianism is a dictionary

It begins, as it always does, with language. Before the uniforms, before the marches, before the disappearances, there is a subtle reshaping of words. Totalitarianism, in every form it has taken, begins by narrowing the range of what can be said — therefore, what can be thought.  Complexity becomes suspicious, vocabulary becomes a casualty of ideology, complexity is replaced by slogan, and precision yields to repetition. In the long quiet that follows, words lose their meaning, and people lose their bearings.

George Orwell understood this. “If thought corrupts language,” he wrote, “language can also corrupt thought.” The relationship is circular, intimate, and dangerous. When language is impoverished, thought follows. When people no longer know the words to distinguish truth from convenience, they become governable in the worst sense of the word.

We like to imagine fascism as a spectacle—loud, flag-waving, unmistakable. In practice, it often enters quietly, through the lexicon. It recasts dissent as ‘disloyalty’ and brutality as ‘protection.’ It teaches us to see euphemism as civility. When fascism arrives, it does not look like the newsreel version. It doesn’t always shout; it often whispers through the euphemisms that rebrand cruelty as ‘policy,’ violence as ‘order,’ censorship as ‘security.’ The authoritarian project begins not with the silencing of speech, but with its cheapening. It depends on citizens who no longer expect words to mean what they mean. To resist, we need vocabulary. Not as a luxury, but as armour.

This is why vocabulary is not simply an academic concern, but a civic one. To build a vocabulary is to build a resistance. The act of choosing the right word is an act of intellectual discipline, and, in an age of deliberate distortion, a moral stance. A person who can articulate distinctions — between ‘policy’ and ‘punishment,’ between ‘patriotism’ and ‘obedience’ — is harder to deceive.

The erosion of language rarely announces itself. Carrie Bradshaw once said she couldn’t help but wonder; I can’t help but notice. I’ve begun to notice this erosion in small ways: People say “you know what I mean” as a stand-in for actually saying it. Debates online collapse into hashtags. Sentences become captions, captions become reactions. The entire project of articulation — of finding the right word, not the nearest one — feels almost quaint. But language, as George Orwell warned, is not ornamental. It is the scaffolding of consciousness. It begins in small ways: the normalisation of imprecision, the casual substitution of reaction for reason, the elevation of slogans over syntax. It continues when we decide that semantics are petty, that clarity is elitist, that words are flexible instruments of mood rather than meaning. But words are not mood, words are structure. The loss of linguistic precision, then, is not a stylistic failure but a democratic one. When we surrender our vocabulary, we surrender our autonomy; language shapes the contours of our understanding and ultimately our capacity for truth.

This is not a call for pedantry. It is a call for care. To know the difference between “anger” and “grief,” between “protest” and “riot,” between “strong” and “cruel,” is not to perform intelligence — it is to preserve consciousness. A well-developed vocabulary is a tool of survival in a culture increasingly organised around the suppression of nuance. Building vocabulary is not about prestige. It’s about agency. The broader your vocabulary, the harder it is for anyone to rewrite your reality.

There is a reason that authoritarian movements distrust poets, journalists, and scholars of language. To burn books is to destroy the evidence of alternative vocabularies—alternative ways of thinking, feeling, existing. Because every word outside the sanctioned lexicon is a threat. To name something precisely is to strip it of its mystique and expose its mechanism. Propaganda depends on the opposite: on words that feel good in the mouth yet say nothing. It depends on citizens who have grown comfortable with approximation. The antidote is not louder speech, but truer speech; the discipline of choosing words that reflect reality, even when they discomfort us. It is the slow work of reading, listening, and building the vocabulary to articulate what we see. Every new word learned, every definition understood, is a small expansion of the possible — a widening of the mental and moral horizon.

If fascism thrives on linguistic poverty, then true democracy depends on linguistic abundance. Our political resilience is directly linked to our verbal one; a society that cannot describe its condition cannot repair it. A citizen who lacks the words for injustice cannot resist it. We are, all of us, custodians of the language we use. Its precision is our responsibility; its decay, our danger. To write clearly, to speak truthfully, to refuse the comfort of the vague or the manipulative — these are not aesthetic choices but political ones.

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia