Discursive Power in Linguistic Flux

I have lived and am living through multiple transformations. Born in the late 1950s, I watched the sixties unfold, survived the seventies, and made it through the eighties and nineties. I was there for all of it, paying attention, participating in the culture, reading the news, listening to the debates. You'd think someone who was present for the whole show would notice when the language itself started changing underneath us.

But I didn't.

Not until about fifteen years ago did I realize that somewhere along the way, people had stopped saying "politics is" and started saying "politics are." I don't recall the precise moment, maybe it was several separate moments, but suddenly it seemed that politicians on television, journalists, commentators, and academics were all doing it. "The politics of this situation are complicated." "Politics are broken." "These politics are toxic."

The disorienting realization hit me gradually. Reality had been shifting beneath my feet, and I'd been walking on it the whole time without noticing the ground was moving. If someone who lived through the entire transition took that long to become conscious of it, what does that tell us about how this change actually happened?

This invisibility isn't accidental. It's the point.

Once I started looking, I found the fingerprints everywhere. "Politics" wasn't the only word that had quietly transformed. "Media" used to be singular. "The media is covering this story." Now it's common to hear "The media are pushing an agenda." Same with "ethics." "Ethics is a branch of philosophy" became "His ethics are questionable." "Aesthetics," "economics," "statistics," "data," they all underwent similar shifts from singular to plural usage.

"Data are" is one of the strangest changes to me. When I think about data, it feels like a unified thing. Information. Evidence. A body of knowledge. But now you constantly hear "The data are compelling" or "These data are inconclusive." It sounds wrong to my ear, like someone trying to sound overly scientific or formal. Data is data. But through the power of discursive language control by elites, it gets fragmented. "Is" becomes "are" with so many words. Unity becomes multiplicity.

The timeline tells a story. In the 1970s, these words were almost universally treated as singular concepts. You might hear the occasional plural usage, but it sounded grammatically off, like a mistake. By the 1980s and 1990s, the shift was apparently gaining momentum (though it was still infrequent enough that I didn't notice it). By the 2000s, plural usage had become commonplace, especially in media and political commentary. Now, in casual conversation and even formal writing, "are" beats "is" regularly.

The systematic nature of it disturbs me. This wasn't random linguistic drift affecting a few scattered words. Abstract collective nouns, the big concepts that shape how we think about society, power, truth, and reality, they all got pluralized together. Maybe that's how language usually evolves, but this feels engineered to me.

The unsettling realization keeps growing. Multiple domains of reality were quietly rewritten while I was living in them, speaking the language, thinking I understood what was happening around me. But I was swimming in changing water without knowing the current had shifted.

So how does something like this actually happen? You can't just announce that everyone should start saying "politics are" instead of "politics is." People would notice. They'd resist. They'd make fun of you. The transgender movement learned this the hard way when they tried to change pronoun usage through explicit campaigns. The pushback was immediate and fierce.

What I witnessed over several decades was different. I suspect it spread through elite circles first. Academia, media, cultural production. These are the spaces where language gets refined, where new ways of talking feel natural because they're surrounded by other new ways of thinking. University seminars, editorial meetings, conference panels, probably cocktail parties in Manhattan and Georgetown. Places where “sophisticated” people gather and influence each other.

The feedback loop was apparently quite elegant. Once enough influential people started using plural forms, it began sounding normal to everyone else who heard them speak. Television hosts, journalists, professors, they weren't trying to manipulate language. They were just talking the way their peers talked. But their platforms amplified these subtle shifts to millions of people who trusted their authority.

The imposed changes feel organic and emergent. Nobody issued a memo. Nobody held a meeting. The changes just seemed to arise naturally from the culture itself beginning in the late 20^th century. That's what makes this kind of power so effective. When you can't see it working, you can't resist it or even comment on it. I'm only doing that now, after it has already happened.

Those pre-broadcast planning meetings probably did play a role, even if participants weren't consciously engineering a grammatical shift. When producers, hosts, and writers discuss how to frame stories they're choosing the linguistic structures that will carry the facts they choose to communicate. Language that sounds current, sophisticated, and socially aware gets reinforced. Language that sounds dated or naive gets filtered out.

The most effective control is the kind you don't feel happening around you. When someone tries to force you to speak differently, you notice and you fight back. But when the change creeps in slowly through media itself (“their self”? Media is now “are”, right?), when it feels like a natural evolution rather than an imposition, your defenses never activate.

This kind of power through language isn't a new discovery. Philosophers like Michel Foucault spent decades analyzing how discourse shapes reality, how the way we're allowed to speak determines what we're able to think. Others like Pierre Bourdieu showed how linguistic habits become forms of social control. They understood that language operates as infrastructure, not decoration. The words we use don't just describe our thoughts, they shape what thoughts are possible in the first place.

But this academic insight rarely makes it into everyday awareness. Most people still think of language as neutral, as just a tool for communication. They don't realize that when you change how people talk, you change how they think. Grammar becomes a delivery system for worldview, smuggling in assumptions about reality while people are focused on the content of what's being said.

When we speak, we're transmitting an operating system. The basic structures of thought, the categories that organize reality, the assumptions about what's possible and what isn't. When that operating system gets quietly updated without your knowledge, you start running someone else's program while thinking it's your own.

Consider what happens when "politics" shifts from singular to plural. Saying "politics is" (as I, once a political animal, have my whole life) implies there's a system, a unified process of governance that can be understood, critiqued, or reformed. Saying "politics are" implies a collection of performances, tribal behaviors, and competing narratives. The plural form doesn't just describe fragmentation, it reinforces the idea that fragmentation is natural and permanent.

This serves power in subtle ways. When concepts become fragmented in language, they become harder to challenge as unified forces. If "politics" are just a swarm of disconnected behaviors and identities, then there's no central system to hold accountable. If "media" are just a collection of different platforms and perspectives, then there's no coherent institution to criticize. The power to fragment concepts through language is the power to make authority diffuse and slippery.

This linguistic shift reflects the ongoing fragmentation of the world into disunified facts rather than holistic concepts. It's part of what philosophers call the postmodern turn, where grand narratives and unified explanations get replaced by competing perspectives and provisional truths. Instead of seeing "politics" as a system that can be understood and reformed, we're trained to see politics as a chaotic collection of competing performances. Instead of "data" as unified information that reveals truth, we get data as fragmented bits that can be interpreted in multiple ways.

I suspect the internet and social media has something to do with all this.

The language doesn't just describe this fragmentation, it reinforces it, making holistic thinking harder and fragmented thinking feel natural. When concepts can't be held together linguistically, they can't be held accountable practically. If there's no unified "media" to criticize, just a swarm of different platforms and perspectives, then who exactly is responsible for misinformation or bias? The fragmentation protects power by making it untouchable.

What this reveals about elite power over language is sobering. They don't need censorship or propaganda when they can shape the basic structures of thought. They don't need to tell people what to think when they can influence how people think. The most profound control operates at the level of grammar and syntax, in the deep patterns that organize meaning before conscious analysis begins.

Of course, I don't want to suggest this all happened with some “grand plan” backing it up. The influencers were likely influenced by forces beyond their conscious awareness. This is truly an example of how the physics of "emergence" works in all things. This shift just happened of its own karmic momentum over a period of 40 – 50 years.

The transgender movement's pronoun campaign offers a great contrast to show how linguistic power works best when it stays invisible. When activists explicitly demanded that people use "they/them" pronouns or learn new terms like "xe/xir," the resistance was immediate and intense. People felt like they were being told how to speak, and they didn't like it.

The contrast couldn't be sharper. The gradual shift from "politics is" to "politics are" succeeded completely. Nobody organized resistance movements. Nobody held rallies defending traditional grammar. The change just happened, and now both forms sound normal to most people. Meanwhile, the pronoun campaign has largely stalled. Despite years of advocacy, institutional support, and media promotion, most people still resist using preferred pronouns outside of specific social or professional contexts.

The pronoun movement made itself into an explicit political project. It tied language change directly to identity politics and social justice. This meant that accepting new pronouns became a public declaration of political allegiance, while rejecting them became an act of political resistance. Once language change gets branded as political advocacy, both sides of the culture wars start paying attention.

Culture war awareness created linguistic vigilance that simply didn't exist for the earlier shifts. People now scan each other's speech for tribal markers. When someone uses "they/them" pronouns, it signals membership in progressive circles. When someone pointedly avoids them, it signals traditionalist identity. The pronouns became weaponized in ways that "politics are" never did.

This proves that successful language manipulation requires invisibility. The most effective discursive power operates below the threshold of conscious awareness. When people realize they're being linguistically engineered, the engineering fails. When they don't realize it, the engineering succeeds completely. The pronoun advocates made the classic mistake of revealing their intentions. They turned language change into a conscious political battle instead of letting it happen through cultural osmosis.

The pronoun pushback wasn't just about grammar or transgender rights. It was about the basic principle of consent in communication. People intuited that if they accepted overt linguistic control in one area, they might be accepting it in others. Their resistance was actually a healthy democratic reflex, even if they couldn't articulate what they were defending against. Too bad they weren't equally vigilant about the changes that had already happened without particularly anyone reacting en mass.

Maybe making is's into are's just isn't a big deal to most people, especially those born in the 1990's and later when all this really started kicking in.  It's not something to get upset about compared with using "they" because "he" or "she" prefer it that way.

Still, these accumulated small changes can create large resentments, even when people can't quite put their finger on what's bothering them. There's a reason traditionalists get mad about what they call "elitist BS." It's not just political disagreement. It's the sense that the rules of communication are being rewritten by people who don't share their values or experiences.

When language shifts happen inside elite circles without broader input or transparency, they create a communication gap that feels like cultural gatekeeping. People sense they're being spoken at rather than spoken with. The new usage becomes a form of insider code that signals membership in sophisticated circles while marking others as out of touch or backward.

This dynamic fuels the culture wars in ways that go beyond traditional political disagreements. When two groups don't just disagree about what to talk about but how to talk about it, dialogue breaks down at a fundamental level. Language becomes a tribal membership marker rather than a tool for shared understanding.

The breakdown of shared communicative ground makes democratic discourse nearly impossible. If we can't agree on basic grammatical structures, how can we hope to agree on complex social issues? When even the infrastructure of communication becomes contested territory, every conversation turns into a battle over identity and authority rather than an exchange of ideas.

This creates what you might call semantic fatigue. People spend so much energy trying to decode what words are supposed to mean, figuring out who's speaking from which political position, scanning for tribal markers and hidden agendas, that there's little energy left for actually engaging with content. The result is predictable. People either retreat into like-minded silos where they don't have to negotiate meaning, or they check out of public discourse entirely. Both responses feed the fragmentation.

Social media amplifies these divisions by making linguistic differences hyper-visible and immediately weaponized. A grammatical choice that might once have passed unnoticed now becomes a flashpoint for cultural conflict. People scan each other's language for tribal markers, ready to attack or defend based on tiny variations in usage.

I occupy an unusual position as someone who lived through this transformation without noticing it was happening, then became conscious of it later. That gives me a strange kind of double vision. I remember when these concepts felt unified and coherent, even if flawed. I also lived through their fragmentation in real time, participating in the culture as it shifted beneath me.

My choice to continue saying "politics is" instead of "politics are" isn't linguistic conservatism. It's habit that could also serve as a form of resistance to invisible power. I love speaking older southern expressions in contemporary settings anyway. “Y'all” is, of course, widely accepted now. “I reckon” is much less so, but I still use it because I think it is an exacting expression.

This choice represents a small claim to linguistic agency in a world where most language changes happen to us rather than through us. You can make similar choices. You can pay attention to how your own speech is being shaped by forces you might not have noticed. You can decide whether to go along with changes that feel imposed or to maintain older forms that feel more honest to your experience.

The broader question this raises unsettles me. What else has been quietly rewritten while we were paying attention to other things? How many of our basic assumptions about reality have been linguistically engineered without our knowledge or consent? Language shapes everything we think we know about the world. If it's being systematically altered by people with particular agendas, then we're not thinking our own thoughts as much as we imagine.

I'm not here to tell you what to do about this. You're in charge of your own speech and your own analysis. That is precisely what “free speech” is. But I believe we can all benefit from understanding how discursive power actually operates. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you can't unsee it, you have choices you didn't know you had before.

The most insidious power is the kind that makes you think you're freely choosing what was actually chosen for you. Language is where that power lives and breathes. But language also changes, with or without anyone's permission. The question is whether we're conscious participants in that change or just along for the ride. Pay attention to it. You might be surprised by what you discover.

Something that intrigues me is that younger people I speak with, millennials and Gen Z mostly, have no idea that language has changed. Saying "politics are" sounds completely normal to them. They've never known anything different. This tells you something important about how language really does evolve through time. These shifts add up, layer by layer, generation by generation. It's why we no longer speak English the way Shakespeare did.

Language is dynamic, sometimes insidiously so.  This is the way of things.

(Assisted by ChatGPT and Claude.)