Faith In Language

Until I looked the words up,
I did not realise that the phrase
'super injunction' were so recent
in being coined, or by whom.

2006, and The Guardian, since you ask.

But I understood it straight away.
I had a long memory of living
as part of a family where explaining
to ourselves and each other
what we were doing
and why we had to do it
was an anathema, or at least
it would have been if they knew
what an anathema was.

Adopting religion, well a faith,
did not help the way I thought it would.
There I found not just taboo,
but taboo about taboo, until faith
in language became that difficult
I did not know what to.

Starting from scratch I kept the faith,
but with George Orwell as my guide
I decided that language has to be direct,
active not passive and what mattered
was being able to say who did what,
and when and why they did it.

To ask all this in faith meant that
I could at least have faith in language,
and maybe language could reflect
the life that I thought I was living.     

When Verbal Versatility Decieves Us

Due to my limited education
I rarely measure how words travel.
Language often leaves me behind
-though less so than it used to.
For instance, until I checked
I didn't realise how far
the word 'market' has shifted.

It now has six basic meanings
which in a society built on money
-and credit at that-rather than barter
or any other system of trade,
incorporating every choice we make.

It is used to describe

1-a place for the transfer of goods.
2-the trade in goods.
3-the group that is sold goods to.
4-individuals who are sold goods to.

And of money at its most abstract
the word incorporates
5-a stock market-the sale of bonds
and other theoretical economic instruments.
6-economic systems which vary
between command, mixed and 'free',
as in 'unregulated', though this extends
the market for secrecy, hypocricy and vice.

Tellingly it does not describe the sellers,
only the goods sold and people sold to,
this helps create the sense of  invisibility
'the hand of the market' relies upon.

After that there the behemoth called marketing
-the promotion of goods through advertising
or otherwise making known the availability thereof,
which like stock markets and economic systems
dwarfs the individual in this age of mass media,
-defining the individual the same way
that a maze defines a rat when it curious.....

What to do when one word describes too much?
This is something proponents of markets won't discuss
for fear of the risk of the language expanding,
which might well legitamise customers saying 'No'
in such a way that might make marketeers listen.