And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes in

When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, with the serene arrogance of the ideologue, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

State governments weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases; lawyers parse syllables; activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. And this is where Lewis Carroll, with his disarming Edwardian whimsy, begins to feel less like a children’s author and more like a diagnostician. Alice, still tethered to an older moral physics, asks the only sensible question: whether words can, in fact, be made to mean so many different things. The answer – never quite resolved in Wonderland is being tested here and now on our streets, in own legislatures, and on our social media  feeds. For if words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm.

It’s only words

We like to imagine that words live quietly in dictionaries, disciplined by etymology and tamed by definition. But they do not live there. They live in history. And history leaves fingerprints.

So, what’s in a word? A root, yes. A history. A memory. A strategy. Sometimes a slur. Sometimes a lament. Often, a rhetorical shortcut. Occasionally a doorway into understanding. We pretend words are neutral. They are not. They are histories. They are wounds. They are strategies. They are prayers. They are threats. They are pleas.

What’s in a word? Enough to start a war. Enough to end a conversation. Enough, if handled carefully, to begin one. The question is not simply what a word means. It is what it does. Does it illuminate complexity, or obscure it? Does it invite argument, or pre-empt it? Does it name suffering without erasing another’s?

Words are fall differentially upon the tongue and the ears; words which some see only as incitement and which the others see only resistance. And yet, these words did not come out of nothing. They arose from lived experience. Palestinians do experience dispossession. Israelis do experience existential threat. Jews carry a historical memory of annihilation that makes the word genocide resonate differently in their ears. Palestinians carry a memory of erasure that makes Nakba less metaphor than inheritance. Each community carries memory as identity. To police to and sanction vocabulary without acknowledging origin and memory is to misunderstand both.

To study a language is to develop a kind of double hearing. You recognise when metaphor shades into innuendo—and when it darkens further into menace.

To study a language is to learn when freedom names a horizon – and when it licenses the powerful to act without restraint. To notice when peace is an aspiration – and when it is a performance designed to defer justice. To recognise when security protects life – and when it expands to govern it; when it names legitimate protection – and when it justifies suffocating control. To feel when homeland gathers memory and when it redraws the map to exclude others. To understand when return is a longing—and when it becomes an argument that displaces those already there.

To study a language is to hear when muqamawwa – resistance – signals dignity – and when it becomes a script that traps a people inside permanent defiance. To know that sumud – steadfastness—can describe dignified endurance and also calcify into the romanticisation of endless struggle. To detect when tadhāmon solidarity – binds people together—and when it flattens complexity into slogan. To recognise when itishhad – martyrdom – honours loss – and when it recruits the living into the service of the dead. To hear when terror names violence—and when it is stretched to delegitimise any form of opposition.

To study a language is to hear when history explains—and when it is curated to absolve.

For years I have studied Arabic – and its roots and patterns: how three consonants generate a constellation of meanings. And I have studied Middle Eastern history with more than academic curiosity – not as spectator sport but with what I would called metaphorical “skin in the game.” Words like jihad, intifada, nakba, aliyah, ‘awda, sumud, words that now ricochet across social media feeds and protest placards, are not abstractions or exotic imports to me. They are layered. Sedimented. They carry centuries in their syntax and sentiment. They are lived terms, argued over, felt in the mouth. And so when someone asks “What’s in a word?” I cannot pretend the answer is neutral.

Intifada. From nafada – to shake off, to shake free. Dust from a cloak. Subjugation from a people. The metaphor is physical, almost domestic. Yet in common Arabic usage, it implies resistance and uprising, and neither are peaceful or passive. In Israeli memory the word is fused to sirens, shrapnel, blown-out windows. It is impossible to hear it without recalling the Second Intifada’s exploding buses and cafés, bloody streets and scattered body parts. So when someone chants “globalise the intifada,” they may imagine solidarity with resistance; others hear a call that premises funerals. The dictionary definition is technically correct. It is also profoundly incomplete. It does not arrive alone; it brings its dead with it.

Or al Nakba. In ordinary Arabic, a misfortune. A bad year. But in Palestinian consciousness it has fossilised into 1948 – villages depopulated, olive groves left untended, families scattered, deeds and keys preserved like heirlooms. It is no longer a generic calamity; it is The Catastrophe. Say it in Ramallah and you evoke dispossession. Say it in western Jerusalem and you may hear, in reply, the memory of a war launched to strangle a newborn state. 1967 is referred to as al Naksa, the setback.

And then there is jihad — perhaps the most mistranslated word in modern political discourse. Its root, jahada, means to strive, to exert oneself. Classical Islamic thought distinguishes between inner moral striving and outward struggle that can be intellectual, and yes, armed defence under defined conditions. Yet modern movements – from anti-colonial insurgencies to nihilistic terror groups – have narrowed and weaponised it. The word has travelled. It has acquired passengers it did not originally carry. To deny that is to be naïve. To reduce it solely to “holy war” is equally ignorant.

Al ‘Awda – the return – carries a weight for Palestinians comparable to the resonance of intifada or nakba. It is not a mere political slogan; it is a moral, legal, and emotional claim bound up with exile, memory, and inheritance and the enduring hope, however fraught, of returning to one’s ancestral land. For Israelis, the concept often triggers apprehension, a fear that the abstract ideal of return could translate into demographic and existential challenge, potentially threatening the state itself. Like intifada or nakba, the word carries histories and futures simultaneously: one side sees longing and justice, the other sees danger.

Hebrew political vocabulary is no less charged. Aliyah – ascent – frames immigration as spiritual elevation. Ge’ulah -redemption – maps theology onto statehood. Am Yisrael Chai – Let Israel Live – evokes covenant, not population. Political vocabulary hums with biblical resonance. It is impossible to excise theology from nationalism in a land where scripture is mapped onto soil.

The power of these words lies not in dictionary meaning, but in the lived and imagined consequences each community projects onto them. So when commentators insist that “intifada just means struggle,” or that “Zionism just means Jewish self-determination,” they are not wrong linguistically. They are incomplete historically. Words do not live in morphology alone. They live in memory.

Let’s cast our etymological web wider and delve deeper in our dictionary and examine words that ricochet across the howling internet in these troubled times. Genocide. Ethnic cleaning. Apartheid. Settler-colonialist. Terrorist. Resistance. Each carries not only denotation but detonation and accusation. Each holds an argument inside a noun. Each is more than description; but also a moral verdict disguised as vocabulary. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck called such terms Kampfbegriffe – battle-words. Words of iron forged in particular historical furnaces, hardened by trauma, and redeployed not merely to describe reality but to shape it.

The same dynamic now saturates discussion of Israel–Palestine. Let’s not pretend that careful language will resolve a conflict this old, this layered, this saturated with grief. But careless language can only make things worse.

Call Israel a “settler-colonial state or an apartheid state” and you situate it in the moral lineage of Algeria, Rhodesia and Pretoria. Call Hamas’ October 7 assault “resistance” and you shift the frame from massacre – to revolt, or to shift the timeframe, to pogrom, the Russian word for destruction, now interpreted as referring to the organised massacres of a particular ethnic group – which, ironically, precipitated the first settlement of European Jews in what was to become Palestine. Call Gaza “genocide” and you summon Auschwitz – whether you intend to or not. Call protesters “terror sympathisers” and you evacuate the possibility of grief motivating them at all. Each move does moral work before the evidence is even considered.

It is here, amid the discourse of colonialism and statehood, that the word genocide warrants careful attention. Unlike settler-colonial or apartheid, which describe systems of domination and segregation, genocide describes intent – the deliberate aim to destroy a people as such. It is not simply a scale of death; it is a moral calculus applied to the machinery of annihilation. To deploy it is to summon not only bodies but histories, to conjure not only numbers but the moral shadow cast by deliberate erasure. In debates over land, displacement, and occupation, it is tempting to apply the term as an ethical accelerant, to compress outrage into a noun. Yet to do so responsibly requires rigor: assessment of intent, systematic targeting, and legal definition. Without that, the word risks inflation, becoming a rhetorical hammer rather than a precise lens. Each word narrows the moral aperture.

And yet, Genocide” now circulates online as hashtag and chant. It trends. It compresses argument into a single, morally incandescent noun. For many who use it in the Gaza context, it is less a legal claim than an expression of horror at the scale of devastation. It is a cry. But cries, once repeated often enough, harden into verdicts.

In Australia, we are hardly innocent of this. We live in a country still wrestling with its own founding vocabulary: terra nullius, invasion, genocide, reconciliation, Voice. These are still contested. We know – or should know – that words can both clarify and inflame. To call Australia “founded on genocide” may be defensible within certain scholarly frameworks; it is also rhetorically maximalist. It shocks the moral nerve. That shock may awaken conscience – or entrench defensiveness. Language is never inert. Words do not merely describe history; they frame it. They allocate blame. They assign virtue. They shape identity.

In That Howling Infinite has spent months untangling these labels. Is Israel a settler-colonial state? Does apartheid apply, and if so, where? Does genocide cross the threshold from metaphor into actionable accusation? Each term compresses arguments into a noun. It performs moral work before the debate even begins.

That compression is seductive. We prefer our tragedies simple: one culprit, one origin story, one clean fingerprint. Words that arrive pre-loaded with moral clarity spare us the labour of nuance. They allow passion and empathy to outrun reason and understanding – which, in an age of instant reaction, they reliably do.

Historical illiteracy compounds the problem. The conflict is older than most of its loudest commentators. Its history is layered with Ottoman legacies, British mandates, partition plans, UN resolutions, wars declared and undeclared, refugees, intifadas, failed peace processes, withdrawals, rockets, settlement blocs, religious revivals, and fractured leaderships on both sides. Yet online discourse flattens this into memes, and to pretend this can be reduced to a meme is historical illiteracy A map. A slogan. A 30-second clip untethered from context. Algorithms reward the sharpest edges. The most incendiary noun travels furthest. Nuance, by contrast, is penalised. It does not trend. It does not fit neatly into a caption. I worry about the generational shift in how these debates unfold. Previous eras had gatekeepers – flawed, certainly – but also editors who demanded sourcing, historians who insisted on chronology. Now discourse is democratised and accelerated. A meme outruns a monograph. A slogan outruns a syllabus.

The language used evolves accordingly. Rhetorical shortcuts proliferate. “From the river to the sea.” “Open-air prison.” “Terror state.” “Colonial entity.” “Death cult.” These phrases are not random; they are engineered for virality. Each word comes preloaded, historical analogies that compress decades into chantable cadences. But chants and slogans compress complexity. They must; that is their function. And that compression distorts: two national movements, two historical traumas, two competing narratives of return and belonging, reduced to a rhyme shouted through a megaphone.

And then there are the slurs: the truncations and code-words. For example, “Zio.” A syllable masquerading as political shorthand yet unmistakably functioning as ethnic hostility. Its power lies partly in deniability. It skirts the boundary of explicit antisemitism while retaining its charge. Deniable enough to evade sanction, sharp enough to wound. But we should be intellectually honest: this phenomenon is not one-directional. The same phenomenon occurs in reverse when “Islamist” becomes a catch-all smear for Muslim political expression, or when “pro-Palestinian” is lazily equated with antisemitic intent. The grammar of dehumanisation is bipartisan: collapsing an entire spectrum of political and religious identity into a caricature designed to foreclose engagement.

So, what, finally, is in a word?

Not merely meaning, but momentum. Not simply definition, but direction. Words do not sit still; they lean. They incline us toward certain conclusions before we have done the work of thinking. They smuggle history into the present tense and call it common sense. They arrive already freighted—with grief, with fear, with memory, with accusation—and we, often unwittingly, become their couriers.

The temptation, always, is to choose the word that does the most work for us—the one that collapses ambiguity, that secures the moral high ground in a single utterance. But that is precisely where language becomes most dangerous: when it relieves us of the burden of holding two truths at once; when it permits us to name one suffering in a way that erases another; when it transforms description into verdict before evidence has even entered the room.

What we do when we misuse words is not trivial. We erode precision. We inflame passions. We collapse law into slogan. We substitute moral theatre for argument. And perhaps most dangerously, we teach ourselves that the loudest noun is the truest one.

History suggests otherwise. It is rarely the loudest words that endure, but the most exacting; not the most incendiary, but the most honest about complexity. The archive is not kind to slogans. It remembers, instead, where language clarified—and where it concealed.

To speak about Israel and Palestine—indeed, to speak about any conflict so saturated with history—is to enter a linguistic minefield in which every term has a past and every past has its partisans. There is no neutral vocabulary here. Only more or less careful usage. Only degrees of awareness. Only the choice, conscious or otherwise, between illumination and incitement.

The task, then, is not to purify language—that is impossible—but to discipline ourselves in its use. To resist the seduction of the Kampfbegriff when it outpaces our understanding. To ask, each time we reach for a word: what history does it carry? What work is it doing? What—and who—does it leave out?

Because if words can start wars, they can also foreclose the possibility of ending them. And if they are capable, at their best, of opening a space for understanding, then that space is narrow, fragile, and easily collapsed by carelessness.

Language will not resolve this conflict. But without care in language, we will not even be able to speak about it honestly.

Coda

To study a language, in the end, is not simply to acquire vocabulary. It is to acquire conscience. It is to hear the echo behind the utterance—the ghost in the grammar. To recognise that every word, especially here, is a small archive: of exile and return, of fear and defiance, of prayer and propaganda. To speak, then, is to handle those archives with a certain humility, aware that one is always, in some sense, trespassing on someone else’s memory.

History suggests otherwise than our instincts: the loudest noun is rarely the truest one. The archive keeps its own counsel. It remembers where language clarified – and where it concealed.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

And in that shadow – linguistic, historical, human – words do their quiet, consequential work.

Postscript

While writing this essay – contemplating the slipperiness of words and widening the lens to the long weather system that has carried them into our mouths – I found myself returning to a simple, disquieting observation: it is no coincidence that so many of the words we have been parsing are Arabic.

It is not that Arabic words per se have become uniquely prone to distortion, nor that there is anything intrinsic to the language that invites what might loosely be called “gaslighting.” What I was circling, rather, is something more historically contingent – and more revealing.

Many of the most contested political ideas of the present moment – intifada, shahid, muqawama, even place-bound words and phrases that travel into English unchanged – are being transmitted untranslated, or only half-translated, into Western discourse. They arrive carrying dense, layered meanings shaped by decades (sometimes centuries) of conflict, theology, nationalism, and lived experience. And then, almost immediately, they are flattened, reframed, or strategically reinterpreted within a different moral and political vocabulary.

In other words, the instability I am sensing is not linguistic but translational – and beyond that, political.

There is, of course, a history to this. One thinks of how words like jihad were narrowed in Western usage to mean “holy war,” their broader theological and ethical dimensions quietly stripped away; or conversely, how certain terms are defended as benign by appeal to their most anodyne, etymological meanings, while bracketing how they are actually heard in context. The same word may present itself as metaphor, slogan, prayer, or threat – depending on who is speaking, who is listening, and what work the word is being made to do.

It is here that the instinct about Wonderland clicks back into place. The move is not uniquely Arabic; it is Humpty Dumpty’s move: control the meaning, and you control the moral frame. But the reason Arabic terms are so prominent in this moment is that the conflicts which have globalised our discourse – Israel–Palestine above all, but also Iraq, Syria, and the wider post-9/11 landscape – have carried those words into English without fully carrying their context with them. They become, in effect, linguistic migrants: visible, charged, and often unmoored.

So yes, it does say something about the modern world. Not that Arabic is uniquely problematic, but that we are living in an age where conflicts travel faster than comprehension, and where words – lifted from one history and dropped into another – become sites of struggle in their own right.

These words have crossed worlds. And in crossing, they have become unmoored enough to be contested, claimed, and weaponised. That unmooring creates opportunity: for some, to soften; for others, to sharpen; for many, to obscure.

It says something, too, about our times – about the way the Middle East has not merely intruded upon but come to dominate political, and indeed social, discourse for more than half a century; at least for as long as I have been paying attention, which is to say, for as long as I have been trying to make sense of the world and finding the same landscape returning, again and again, like a half-remembered refrain.

Let us take June 1967 as a point of departure. For a few brief weeks, the world’s gaze lifted from the humid, grinding quagmire of Indochina and fixed instead upon the sudden, almost biblical drama unfolding in the not-so-Holy Land – a war measured in days but reverberating in decades. Territory shifted, certainly; but something else shifted too: attention, imagination, the sense that this small, overburdened strip of earth had become a stage upon which the modern world would repeatedly rehearse its anxieties.

The focus has waxed and waned since, but it has never truly moved on. 1973 Oil Crisis and the realisation that the region’s tremors could rattle the global economy. The long, theatre-of-the-absurd years of hijackings and televised terror. Camp David’s fragile choreography. The Iranian Revolution, bending time backward and forward at once. The Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. Lebanon’s fracturing. The attritional horror of the Iran–Iraq War. Kuwait and the return of great-power spectacle. Oslo’s brief, luminous promise. Then 9/11, collapsing distance altogether, followed by Afghanistan again, Iraq again – the sense of recursion, of history caught in a tightening loop.

Then the Arab Spring – hope flickering, briefly, before giving way to Syria’s abyss, to ISIS and its grotesque theatre, to the multiplication rather than the resolution of fault lines. And through it all – before it, beneath it, after it – Israel and Palestine remain: a permanent fixture in the taxonomy of torment, sans pareil, the conflict that resists conclusion, that absorbs language and returns it sharpened, refracted, or hollowed out.

It is from this long saturation – this decades-long immersion in images, slogans, translations, and retranslations – that our present arguments about words emerge. They are not sudden. They are sedimentary. Each phrase we now parse carries within it the residue of these moments, these crises, these unfinished stories.

Which is to say: when we argue about what a word means, we are never only arguing about language. We are arguing about history – compressed, contested, and still very much alive.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

See also, Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, Standing on the high moral ground is hard work! ‘ Same old stone, different rock. What’s in a word?, Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty