Emily's Word World #3

I must now archive an instance when I was corrected by the lovely and intelligent Emily.

Liberal v. Conservative

This is a post from another website written by a college friend of mine by the name of W. Clayton Nunnally:


One thing that bothers me is when people apply either of these two labels inappropriately or when they mean something else but for some reasons use one of the two labels.

I bring this up today because the supreme court ruling re: immenent domain provides a great example of the actual meaning and the difference between the two. And because Tom Friedman, a fantastic author, uses the term Liberal interchangebly with 'progressive' (and that bothers or confuses me).

I have the impresssion, valid or not, that conservative or liberal applies to one's opinion on how much government (generally federal) should be applied. I can only see this meaning in reference to something else, i.e. "economically liberal/conservative". My understanding would be that a conservative thinking person would believe the government would be better with less "knobs" on the nations economy, a liberal thinking: more knobs.

Then people throw these terms around and automatically attach 'conservative' to the adjective 'Christian' when there is no need for it.Friedman calls Islamic fundamentalist in Iran "conservative" when they actually have knobs on every goddamn aspect of a society. And he speaks of 'liberals' in the same place when he actually means 'progressive'.

Even more generally, people who think they are liberals use the word 'conservative' when they want to say 'bad'. And vice versa with 'conservatives'. Conclusion: The learning of definitions of words "second hand" or by inapropriate context leads to an avalanche of inappropriate usage. This also leave many people misrepresenting thier political ideology because they attribute false meaning to these two terms.

And yes, this is along the same lines as my problem with the usage of "Literally". I hope you notice both cases of misusage from now on.


Well said. Oddly enough, this misuse was the basis of the first communication problem I ever had with the beautiful Emily. She was trying to correct my usage of the terms, along the lines of the above writing. I became frustrated 1) because I was wrong and felt foolish for being inaccurate for all my adult life, and 2) she was right and very sure of it.