The fancypants word that wine snobs use for themselves is “oenophile.” Snobs love fancypants words because it gives them the veneer of the technical, like a doctor using the Latin names of body parts. And so the subset of old-guard wine snobs who still believe that French wine is inherently the best tend to appeal to “terroir” to explain why even the very same grapes grown in similar climes in other countries can’t approach the quality of the French stuff. Terroir just means soil, and in wine terms, it’s used for the theory that some special, ineffable “je ne sais quoi” about the earth of France makes for a better red than that declasse Chilean or Californian dirt ever could.
Now, maybe French wine really is better, maybe it is not. I really don’t know anything about wine. What I know is that appealing to “terroir” is not intended as an actual scientific explanation of how the wine got the way it is. Using it is a statement about the wine snob’s own attitude. It’s a signal of alignment with a certain cultural type.
To take a sharp turn toward the point: “Terror,” it is turning out, has come to work for violence a lot like “terroir” works for wine. It’s used to say something about the views of the person using it. As Waller Newell puts it: “People began to think that when a violent act is labeled ‘terrorism,’ this implies that it is somehow more evil, more unjust, than a violent act with no terroristic motive — that people concerned about terrorism are less bothered by other kinds of criminality such as violence motivated by racism. The response is increasingly to label every form of violence as ‘terror’ as if it were some kind of honorific title.” I happened upon that passage from Newell’s book Tyrants the same day that the governor of my home state of New York, Andrew Cuomo, responded to brutal anti-Semitic stabbings in Rockland County by designating them an “act of terror” under a new law passed in August.
The rush to label acts of racist mass violence as terrorism is more about policymakers looking serious than about policies that actually are serious. The New York law “define[s] hate-fueled murder with the intent to cause mass casualties as an act of domestic terrorism.” Is there such thing as respect-fueled murder? I’m glad to see politicians at least trying to take this recent anti-Semitic attack seriously. But it’s disheartening how reflexively people now think “creating change,” as Cuomo congratulated himself for when signing the bill, consists merely of redefining words. Contorting the meaning of words harms language in real ways, but it seldom yields any substantial or immediate change in the real world.
The word “terror” in its legal form is a very technical designation that allows armed agents of the United States to kill people. It doesn’t just mean “thing we mega-disapprove of.” Or at least, it shouldn’t. The new law is really a product of the new public usage of terror, in which not calling some violence terrorism makes the biggest statement. Any time this happens to a word, it has ceased to be a real word, in the sense of something that conveys a discrete meaning, and instead become a sort of social test.
In treating “terror” as a pseudotechnical honorific, we are just talking about our own attitude under the guise of taking violence seriously. That isn’t making people safer — it’s making language weaker.
