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Words matter. And yet, we seem to be doing everything in our power to make them mean less.
Every morning we wake up to a new entry in the cultural lexicon — a new phobe, a new -ism, a new term that signals either that you're in or you're out. The English language has become less a tool for communication and more a social scorecard.
That's worth examining carefully. Because when words stop meaning what they mean, everything downstream suffers — including our faith.
Stop Making Up Words
The Oxford English Dictionary keeps adding to its collection. Let's look at a few recent additions.
Bedwear. Clothing suitable for wearing in bed. You might know it by its older, perfectly acceptable name: pajamas. But pajamas, apparently, isn't cool enough. So now we have bedwear — which, for the record, sounds less like sleepwear and more like a skin condition requiring ointment.
Bomb diggity. A noun or adjective meaning "the best" or "excellent." As in, "This pizza is bomb diggity." Or, if your boss is very confused about professional communication, your quarterly performance review is bomb diggity. This is a brand-new coinage, not an old word repurposed — which makes its inclusion in the Oxford dictionary all the more baffling. Imagine that showing up in a job review: We really feel your second-quarter performance was bomb diggity. What is the employee supposed to do with that?
Bed and breakfasting. A financial term — the practice of selling shares late in the day and buying them back the next morning to capture a tax benefit. Couldn't care less what they call it, but apparently Oxford could.
The frustration here isn't with all new words. Bluetooth needed a name. Google became a verb and we all adapted — we are barely 25 years removed from "Google" not being a verb at all. Brand names like Kleenex absorbed their entire product category. In the American South, every soft drink is a Coke: Mountain Dew Coke, Fresca Coke, whatever you like. Language evolves. That's fine.
The problem is when new terms are invented not to name something genuinely new, but purely to signal cultural membership. That's not language evolution. That's fashion wearing a dictionary's clothing. You're not sleeping in pajamas anymore — you're sleeping in bedwear. You're not sanctified — you're undergoing spiritual formation. The words are fancier. The reality is identical. But the new term announces to the room that you're more current than the person still using the old one.
That matters more than it might seem. Because the real function of words isn't to make us sound sophisticated — it's to help one person hand a thought to another person intact. The moment we start using language to perform rather than communicate, we've abandoned the whole point.
More Words, Less Vocabulary
Here's what's strange: we have more words than ever, but we're using fewer of them.
In the 1800s, the English language contained roughly 70,000 words. Today, that number has ballooned to approximately one million. And yet the average English speaker's active vocabulary has gone down — from 20,000–35,000 words in regular use back then to just 15,000–20,000 today. We have fourteen times the inventory and we're drawing from a smaller portion of the shelf.
Love is the clearest example. I love my kids. I love the Lord. I love your shoes. I love that nail color. We've stretched one word across experiences that have almost nothing in common, and in doing so, drained it of meaning. Cool has been running since the 1960s — still useful, still everywhere — but it's doing enormous heavy lifting for a word that technically describes a mild drop in temperature. When everything is cool, nothing is particularly anything.
The result is a strange paradox: more communication tools, less actual communication. We have emojis now for things that used to require sentences. Before that, a colon and a parenthesis made a smile, and a lone "K" meant okay. We kept simplifying. And somewhere in that simplification, we lost precision — the very thing words exist to provide.
Words are supposed to unify us around an idea. They're supposed to compress a thought clearly enough that another person receives it the way it was sent. When we get lax with them — when everything is fine, everything is cool, everything is whatever — we're not just being casual. We're eroding the infrastructure of understanding.
The Hijacking of Language
Word inflation is annoying. But there's something far more dangerous than adding new words: stealing old ones and reversing their meaning.
Around 1910–1915, G.K. Chesterton wrote that a hijacking was underway — specifically targeting the words arrogant and humble. He saw it coming over a century ago. And over the last hundred years, it has been cemented completely.
Here's what happened.
A man who says "I am not a perfect person, so I will fully rely on what God's word says" — someone who defers to scripture over self, who submits to a higher authority and recognizes that his own judgment is fallible — was once considered humble. Not relying on self. Anchored to something outside himself.
A person who says "I will determine for myself what's right, weigh everyone's opinion equally, and let my own judgment be the final word" — that used to be called arrogant. Self-determining. Elevating self above revelation.
Now those labels have completely swapped.
Stand firm in scriptural conviction and you're arrogant — close-minded, unwilling to listen, a phobe of one variety or another. Absorb every opinion as equally valid, decide for yourself, defer to no external moral authority? That's humility now. You're so open-minded. So tolerant.
Once you start noticing the mechanism, you can't stop seeing it — and that's actually the right response. When you're shopping for a specific car model, you suddenly notice that model everywhere on the road. The road was always full of them. You just weren't primed to see them. Sensitivity, once developed, reveals what was there all along.
The same trick has been run on the rainbow — a symbol of God's covenant mercy after the flood, the sign that he would never again judge the earth by water. It's been so thoroughly repurposed that a church can't display one without triggering a completely different set of associations. A basket of Noah's Ark pins becomes something else entirely.
Woke is another. The call to "wake up" began in the Christian movement — a summons out of spiritual slumber, a recognition of the urgency of the moment. It got absorbed, flipped, and turned into the ideological framework that now insists the truly awakened are those who've moved past the constraints of biblical morality. The language of spiritual urgency became the branding of spiritual compromise.
This is exactly what the counterfeiter does. He doesn't create something new. He takes what's genuine and corrupts it gradually — so gradually that even people who should know better have to pause before they use the original term. That's not accidental. It's strategic. And words are the mechanism.
Context Is Everything
This matters especially in biblical interpretation, because the stakes there are eternal.
Here's a phrase. Imagine you're on the island of Patmos with John — you know only what he knew, with no frame of reference beyond that world. Someone says to you:
"He pulled up to the pump and filled up."
You could parse every word. Pulled — up — pump — filled — up again. You might construct some meaning. But you would never land on the right one: a man driving a car to a gas station.
That's the problem with reading ancient texts through a modern lens, and with lifting single verses out of their context to build theology. Jesus's reference to new wine and old wineskins wasn't about decorative leather teardrops — it was about goat skins tied together, holding gallons of wine, expanding and contracting with pressure. Everyone in that culture understood exactly what he was describing. When we flatten the text into our own assumptions, we stop hearing what was actually said.
Consider the word up alone — you can rise up, bring something up, clear something up, fill up, pull up, mess up, give up, look up. Twenty different contexts, twenty different meanings. Single words inside ancient languages carry that same weight, multiplied across centuries of translation: Greek to Latin to German to English, with interpretive choices made at every step. When you then cut a verse loose from its surroundings and try to build a doctrine on it, you're not doing theology. You're doing something else.
As Inigo Montoya put it: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
This is also why Denzel Washington's line lands so hard: "If it's not on the page, it's not on the stage." You can only improvise so far. And when the words on the page are God's words — when getting them right is the whole point — getting them wrong isn't just an intellectual error. It has consequences that extend well past the conversation.
When the Language Gets Weaponized
People like James Telerico are why all of this matters at the level of real consequence.
Telerico is a former public school teacher, currently attending a Presbyterian seminary, who has recently entered political prominence — and who has made a series of claims about God and scripture that cannot charitably be described as anything other than an abomination.
He claims God is non-binary — invoking the language of gender ideology and applying it to the Creator. To say God is female would be wrong. To say God is non-binary is a lie. Men, women, and children across every race are made in God's image. But we refer to God as Father. That's not a cultural artifact. That's revelation. It's very binary, and intentionally so.
He claims atheists he knows are more Christlike than actual Christians. This is a tired rhetorical move — using Christianity's own ethical standards to indict Christians while rejecting the Christ from whom those standards come. The data on Christian divorce gets routinely mangled the same way: the claim that Christian marriages fail at the same rate as everyone else collapses the moment you separate people who actually practice their faith from those who merely check the box. Someone who fills a pew for two weeks after a local tragedy doesn't represent the same thing as someone genuinely living under God's word.
He has tried to use scripture to justify abortion. That's not a creative interpretation. That's heresy.
Here's what makes him genuinely dangerous: he's well-spoken, clean-cut, and delivers his claims with conviction. The brain in every listener instinctively scans for credibility markers — and he hits them. Until you actually think about what he just said.
The tactic of using credentials to shut down dissent runs parallel to this. Are you a seminarian? Are you a doctor? Are you credentialed? It's the same mechanism that told parents they weren't qualified to assess whether their children were breathing well with a mask on. No credentials are required to feel that the mask on your face is restricting your oxygen. Common sense is a legitimate form of knowledge. And a seminarian teaching heresy has less authority than a layperson rightly handling the word of truth — not more.
The relevant passage isn't obscure. Matthew 23 covers this in detail. Jesus reserved his sharpest language not for the openly irreligious, but for religious figures who dressed truth in the right clothes while gutting it from the inside.
The Mirror Bible and the Cost of Bad Translation
Telerico is visible and loud. More dangerous in some ways is the quiet corruption happening in pulpits through texts that look like Bibles but aren't.
There is a paraphrase circulating called The Mirror — written by a single individual, marketed as a translation. It is not a translation. It is one person's creative reimagining of the text, and it is deeply problematic. And yet a significant number of pastors are quoting from it in their pulpits.
The people in those pews are trusting. They're assuming that what comes from that book and that platform is scripture. They have no reason to think otherwise. So quietly, steadily, they are being fed something that looks like bread and isn't.
This is what Chesterton's word hijacking looks like at scale. It doesn't announce itself. It simply substitutes. The Passion Bible operates similarly — smoothing over the text's demands, domesticating its harder edges, flattening theology into affirmation. The result is what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians: a veil over the face of those who are perishing. People consuming counterfeit spiritual food don't know they're malnourished. They feel fine. They're comfortable. And they may never encounter the actual saving grace of the Christ they think they've been worshipping.
The answer is familiarity with the original. Not necessarily seminary-level Greek — though that helps — but deep, consistent, sustained time in reliable translations across multiple versions over years. If you look at the original long enough, the counterfeits start to reveal themselves. A word that's been subtly shifted. A phrase that carries different weight than what you've been hearing. A doctrine that, held against the actual text, simply doesn't hold.
If you don't look at the original at all — if you just let the current carry you — you can spend a lifetime consuming a religion assembled for your comfort and never intersect with the one true God it was supposedly about.
The Manipulation Toolbox
False teachers don't just misuse words. They also know how to shut down your ability to evaluate what you're hearing in real time.
One of the most common techniques: mid-sermon crowd participation. A preacher builds momentum through a point, then — God said that. Amen? Say amen. And the room responds in unison.
That's not worship. That's a manipulation tactic. It interrupts critical thinking at the exact moment you should be evaluating what was just said. You've agreed before you've processed. The preacher carries the audience along the current of the message without letting anyone pause and ask: wait — is that actually true?
It's subtle. Most people in the room never notice it. That's the point.
And the difficult truth is that nobody is above this kind of manipulation. People who study false teaching are susceptible. People who have spent years learning to spot the mechanisms are susceptible. The conversation you were having ten minutes ago primes what you hear next. Get deep enough into a discussion about false doctrine and a completely innocuous comment about salad dressing can land as a theological statement — because the brain is already primed to receive things that way.
Manipulators and false teachers understand context. They know how to set the frame before they introduce the content. They know that if they can get your brain into the right posture, it will receive things it would otherwise reject.
This is not a new trick. It's the oldest one.
The defense isn't paranoia or reflexive suspicion of every teacher. It's what's been described throughout: know the original so well that the copy rings hollow. True Christianity, as R.C. Sproul put it, is nothing more than one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. There's no performance in that. No manufactured authority. No crowd warm-up designed to lower your defenses. Just the honest word, plainly delivered.
Words That Drift, and Words That Stand
This is ultimately where all the inflation, hijacking, and subtle manipulation leads: a slow drift away from what God actually said, justified at every step by language that sounds close enough.
It starts small.
God loves everybody. — True.
God accepts everybody just as they are. — A step.
Who am I to say anything? — Another step.
Judgment is arrogance. You don't have to change. — And now you're so far from the text that you're barely in the same territory. But each individual step seemed reasonable, even charitable.
Take a line and walk it a few degrees off true. Early on, you can barely see the deviation. Walk it long enough and you end up somewhere completely different from where you intended. That's how bad theology works. That's how bad corporate culture works. That's how bad policy works. Nobody announces the destination at the beginning. The drift is the mechanism.
And sometimes — this is the hardest part — people get so far down a road that even when they recognize it, coming back feels impossible. That's where repentance comes in. Not as a religious performance, but as the actual act of turning around and saying: I was wrong. I need to walk back. That kind of humility — real humility, the original kind — is genuinely rare.
Against all of that drift, all the inflation and hijacking and subtle replacement, there is one thing that doesn't move.
As for God, his way is blameless. The word of the Lord is refined. He is a shield to all who take refuge in him. — Psalm 18:30
Every word of God is pure. He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. — Proverbs 30:5
The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. — Isaiah 40:8
And because Jesus is the Word made flesh, and Hebrews 13:8 declares he is the same yesterday, today, and forever — that stability isn't just textual. It's personal.
A million new words added to the English language. Old words with their meanings quietly reversed. Paraphrases dressed up as translations. Teachers using the vocabulary of faith to lead people somewhere faith was never meant to go.
In the middle of all of it: a fixed text, meaning exactly what it has always meant.
You can trust it today. You can trust it tomorrow. You can trust it for the rest of your life and on into eternity.
That's not a small thing. In a world where bedwear is in the Oxford Dictionary and James Telerico is a seminarian, it might be the most important thing there is.