Welcome to Citizen. We're going to talk about postmodernism and language today.

A few things that have been on my mind lately,

and so I think people need to know and understand about these tricks of language

and how they're used, whether it's Kafka or the attempt by postmodernness

to erase culture, erase meaning, things like that.

Because I feel like if you can tell by this example, you'll be able to see it as it's happening in other examples as well.

And it's something that's been going on for a while, but especially lately, it's been

it's been a primary motif of people who try to control discourse

capturing words and it's not just the left that does it it's the right as well

frank luntz and newt gangrich turned the word. I guess you could say Rush Limbaugh as well.

Turn the word liberal into a pejorative in the 1980s and 1990s, though the word liberal has a real meaning.

We've discussed it many times before and it's not something that you should feel negatively

about you may be oriented the other way but that doesn't mean that classical liberalism is somehow

negative um it's complimentary actually so today we're going to talk about grammar and identity

and the philosophical break beneath it.

And this is the history of the word gender and the idea behind it.

Now, a few words in the English language have traveled as far, as fast, as gender.

Excuse me.

If you had asked an educated Englishman in 1850 what gender meant, he would have reached

for a grammar text.

Gender was a category of language, masculine, feminine, or neuter.

A way of sorting nouns, not souls,

...