There will be a sale on mattresses. There will be one more cookout before the weather turns. Somebody at the grill will say the words last hurrah of summer and nobody will correct him, because that is what the day is now.
That is not a complaint about the cookout. Go to the cookout. The hamburger is not the problem.
The problem is that the word went soft.
Labor used to be a hard word.
It meant the hours. It meant men and women who worked twelve and fourteen of them, six days a week, and decided that was enough of that. It meant walking off. It meant the company store and the company houses and the company men who came out to explain that walking off was not permitted.
People got hurt over that word. Some of them did not come home.
They won. The eight-hour day is not a gift somebody handed down. It is a thing that was taken, at cost, by people whose names are not on anything.
Then in 1894 the government made it a federal holiday and put it on a Monday.
A Monday.
The whole fight was about which days belong to you. And the settlement was: here, take this one.
I am not saying that was a trick. I am saying that once a word gets a parking space on the calendar, it stops being a verb.
Now look what happened to the other one.
Social justice started out as a demand. It came out of church basements and it meant a specific thing — that a society can be arranged fairly or unfairly, and that the arrangement is a choice somebody makes, which means somebody can be asked to unmake it.
It has a target in it.
Today the phrase mostly tells you which team the speaker is on. Say it in a room and half the room decides what you are before you get to the second sentence. It has become a jersey.
The point is what happened to the phrase. Same thing that happened to Labor. It got said so often, by so many people who wanted the credit without the cost, that it stopped naming a fight and started naming a side.
A word that names a side cannot do any work. Sides do not fix anything. Sides just stand there.
Here is the mechanism, and it is always the same three steps.
One.
Somebody fights for a thing and names it. The name is sharp because it has to be — it has to point at what is wrong.
Two.
They win, or they win enough. The name gets popular. People who did not do the fighting start using it, because using it is free and it makes you sound like you were there.
Three.
The name gets used more often than the thing gets done. And after enough of that, saying the word becomes the doing. Nobody checks anymore. The word is the receipt.
That third step is the whole disease.
A word that used to describe an action ends up substituting for it.
Now I will do the thing I would want somebody to do to me, and turn this on my own work.
I spend my days on AI governance.
Governance.
Another hard word gone soft. It used to mean a mechanism — who decides, who checks, what happens when it fails. Now a company publishes a page saying it has an AI governance framework and that page is the governance. Nobody asks what fires. Nobody asks what happens when it does not.
I built a whole framework on exactly that complaint. The first line of the thing says declaration is not compliance — that any system can announce a rule is active, and announcing it is not holding it.
Which means my own term is one bad year away from the same fate.
I have been calling what I do session governance. It is new enough that nobody has had time to wear it down. But if it catches on, it will get picked up by people who want the credit without the checking, and it will go the way of the other two. That is not paranoia. That is just what step two looks like from the inside.
The only protection I know of is to make the word carry a receipt. Not we have session governance. Here is the hash, here is the count, here is what failed and what we did about it. A word with a number attached to it is harder to wear smooth.
That is not a solution. It is a delay. But a delay is worth having.
So here is what I would ask of you tomorrow, and it costs you nothing and does not interrupt the cookout.
Pick one word you use that used to be hard.
Freedom. Family. Faith. Fair. Community. Accountability. Whichever one you say most and examine least.
And ask yourself the plain question: when I say that, does anything happen? Or is the saying the whole of it?
If nothing happens, the word has gone soft on you. That is not a moral failure. It happens to every word that wins.
But it is worth knowing, because a man walking around with a pocket full of soft words believes he is armed.
They struck on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays. On days that were not days off, which was the entire point, because a day off you were given is not the same as a day you took.
Enjoy the Monday. It was bought and paid for.
Just do not mistake the receipt for the purchase.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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