Remember When Words Had Meaning?
July 5, 2026
“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; and moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness.”
– Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III
In Thucydides’ account of the civil war in Corcyra, partisans scrambled the language of virtues and vices to serve their factions. They rebranded reckless audacity as loyal courage, dismissed prudent hesitation as cowardice, and treated moderation as a mask for men without the stomach for a fight.
Once factional loyalty swallowed all else, every moral value was graded solely by its utility to the side.
It’s a distortion somehow worse than ordinary deception; a conventional liar relies on fixed meanings; he needs "courage" to still mean courage, or his lie is useless. The Corcyrean partisans, however, fundamentally changed the worth of the words themselves, defining "good" as whatever their faction needed in the moment. When the reckless man is hailed as brave, and the cautious man condemned as a coward, neutral ground vanishes - because the actual vocabulary required for debate has already been seized.
People don’t corrupt their language on a whim. They do so because the shared foundation keeping those meanings steady - the belief in a standard higher than the faction - has already been destroyed. The distortion of vocabulary is a late-stage symptom. By the time these men heard the word "moderation" and felt a twinge of contempt, they had long since lost the capacity to practice it.
A society’s dictionary is where its sickness finally becomes visible.