A couple of years back, a delightfully linguistic joke went viral online: “‘Forgive me father for I have sinned’ and ‘Sorry daddy I’ve been bad’ both mean very similar things but have wildly different connotations.”
The sentences really are synonymous, but you know which one is appropriate for the confessional and which one isn’t. Connotation always counts, and this is one great illustration of when it counts a lot. But sometimes, a word takes on such a significant connotation that it becomes all connotation, a sort of mere verbal wink or nudge divorced from its original meaning.
On a subway platform poster in New York, under a large, all-caps “RESPECT,” I recently read the slogan, “Hate has no place in our transit system.” Now, I was born and raised in New York City, so I know I am not supposed to read this literally. The other day, I forgot my earbuds, and I was stuck next to a child whose parents did nothing about the fact that his smartphone was on full volume as he played some sort of game where you loudly explode farm animals with a cartoon laser. Hate had a place on the subway that day. But not in the novel sense the poster intended it. And it is a novel sense, almost a new word entirely from the “hate” that appears in the dictionary, as in a synonym for “despise” or “loathe.” It’s the purely connotative sense. A sense also present on the website of hatehasnohome.org, which says its message is this:
“The Hate Has No Home Here project seeks to declare neighborhood residences, businesses, and places of community free from hate speech and behavior, providing safe places for conversation, work, learning, and living.”
Since this sentence is the verbal equivalent of a comfort blanket and means absolutely nothing, I assume its real message is, “Buy stickers for the door of your coffee shop to tell your neighbors and customers you are not prejudiced.” (Do people assume anybody without a sticker is hateful, whatever this version of “hate” means?)
It’s also the sense of hate present in the phrase “hate speech,” a term that includes racial stereotyping, but not in the phrase “I hate you.” We’re far away from the original meaning of the word. This is why the new meaning of “hate” should be looked at with suspicion. All its punch comes from its connotation, not its literal definition. You’re just supposed to know why it appears where it does — just as you are supposed to know whether to call a priest “father” or “daddy.” It’s a custom, not an expression of a thought. So it muddies up a perfectly good word for a perfectly bad emotion.
I don’t really object to “Hate Has No Home Here” yard signs, of course. It’s a nice, if pointless, gesture toward some lefty utopian society. But accepting buzzwords uncritically means misdiagnosing an issue or not thinking about it at all. Hate has always been a potent word. We shouldn’t dilute it.
