2021-01-25
Spoken, or more likely, spat back at what I assure you was an inoffensive, yet precise statement clarifying the meaning of some term, word, or concept someone else tossed off in a used in a willy-nilly, loosey-goosey, off-the-cuff manner.
I have learned that, on an interpersonal level, the words “that’s just semantics” constitute something more akin to a magic spell, an invocation, a ward against the demons who rise from that lowest plane of American Hell: the icy depths of critical self-analysis.
I learned this, by trying to continue the conversation after the ward has been invoked.
But as this is not a conversation, and you are still here, perhaps you will join me on a merry romp through the semantics of “that’s just semantics”.
Our first stomach-lurching drop down the rabbit hole, of decomposing the notion “that’s just semantics”, brings us to the sheer grammar of the statement.
First, we have that lovely linguistic pointer finger, the pronoun, a stand-in for something already present: my erudite statement or pronouncement, lingering in the air, has been reduced to a “that”, as the subject of the sentence.
Sandwiched in the middle stands English’s most universal, most used, and thus most abstract, connective, an “is”: the action of the sentence is this linking verb, whose simple action ties its left hand to its right with something approximating equality.
Next comes the last, the predicate nominative, the object of the sentence linked by that linking verb to the subject held firm in its left hand: whatever it is, that “that” points to, is asserted to be, whatever “semantics” is.
But wait, there’s more! Our incisive interlocutor has deigned to grace this sentence with a clarifying modifier, an adjective: the “this” thing isn’t merely “semantics”, but rather it is “just semantics”.
The whole shebang stands together in declarative form: linking “this” to “just semantics” with an ersatz equality comes down to us in the form of assertion, rather than question or hypothetical.
All of these grammatical constructs, I assume, you learned in middle or high school, as soon as your impressionable mind could grasp these most important of concepts.
Or, perhaps, your grammar education was, shall we say, light? Or that your grammar education, no matter how thorough, hides now in hazy past, beyond many distant horizons, so that these terms ring like a bell heard before waking, present, but not accounted for in conscious memory?
For those who were likely never told why they would even be taught grammar, in the first place, I believe we should have a quick review.
Grammar is the geometry of thought
If you learn to drive, you learn about the left and right sides of the road; how to identify left and right, when there are many lanes in both directions, what left and right means when the line of the road makes a circle, or intersects the lines of other roads.
You sould also learn how your perspective as driver is inherently askew, that the physical center of the car is not your normal, accustomed center: in driving on the right, your station in the car is on the left, so as to maximize your view in important, dangerous situations; therefore, the vehicle’s physical center is shifted to your right.
You learn about forwards, and backwards, and the appropriate use for each. You learn, hopefully, about how the geometric intersection of your vehicle, and any other vehicle, person, or edifice, is to be avoided through careful application of a geometric understanding of yourself, your carriage, and the world around you.
Then, if you learn how to ride a bike on the road, you get to learn about how little the drivers around you have obtained or retained of this training, judging by their actions, of how the road system works, the way in which the grammar and rhythm of it protects us from each other.
Which should come at little surprise, to the cultural obsever, for Americans get by on a minimum of grammar in all its aspects.
Which turns out fine, most of the time, as all humans come equipped with fascinatingly complicated craniums, each housing a neural framework that instinctively absorbs the geometry of the interactions around us.
But then there’s the exceptions to “most of the time”, where our instinctive learning serves to fool us, and we run over a cyclist with a car, because we forgot to check the right-hand side mirror when turning right at an intersection.
Grammar and semantics are the geometry and physics of language, underpinning and governing every interaction we dare make with words.
Forget to check your blind spots at your, and your fellows’, peril.
I remember one especially poignant instance of my words receiving that heckling splatter of “that’s just semantics”.
Something about the American real-estate market crash of 2008-2009 came up in casual, if fairly intellectual, conversation. I only vaguely remember the prefacing element– something about how the crash was a perilous affront to the societal good of home ownership. Naturally, to my way of thinking, I graspec the notion at its core of meaning: that the crash was not about home ownership, in a true sense, since the domiciles in question were collateral to massive debt.
“that’s just semantics”
I didn’t get this from my interlocutor of the moment, the person I wanted to engage on the topic of “ownership” and its (putative) intrinsic goods; rather, another acquaintance, involved in the conversation, saw fit to shut down my input on the matter, for daring to take issue with a concept.
I still maintain that the difference is important.
Ownership is definite, and solidly protected in American law and custom. That which is owned, is not (supposed to be) easily parted from its holder, except by open legal process, or by theft.
What happens, then, if you disclose something you own as collateral? You take out a loan, by handing over the title of your vehicle to secure it. In some sense, you still own your vehicle at that point– but in another sense, you have put that ownership in a nebulous state, a super-position of two situations, as with Schrödinger’s cat. Until the debt is paid, or defaulted, the final ownership disposition remains unknown.
Such standard practice of secured loans makes the ownership situation clear– even when it is in super-position, the ownership-use of the secured collateral remains in the hands of the debtor until the debt may be lawfully collected. Home ownership under a mortgage follows not this standard creditor’s clarity. Instead, it plays a legal, and semantic, game.
The hopeful home-purchaser, who stands without requisite hard currency, instead goes to a “mortgage” provider– a lender of a certain sort. This lender, if they deem the debtor worthy of the risk of default, hands over a loan in the appropriate amount, minus a customary partial payment, for purchase of the domicile in question.
Here, our title-loan-debtor and our mortgage-debtor stand in two rather different legal situations. The secured loan holder may, at any time, discharge his obligation by handing over the security– the ownership of his vehicle. The unsecured mortgage holder, may not; for the domicile in question does not, somehow, secure the loan.
Here, I identify the semantic shell-game that the mortgage lender plays (preys?) upon the mortgage debtor: if the debtor defaults on payment, there is no escape but bankruptcy– and, usually, surrender of the few precious commodities to his name, such as the domicile purchased with the mortgage payment.
This situation is of no grave concern, if the domicile has retained its value. Indeed, if it has dared increase in value, the home-owner stands to receive all down-payment and principal paid, plus profit. Even a modest decline in market value poses no terrible calamity, as the down payment secures both parties against such tribulations.
What, then, if the domicile in question, isn’t worth much at all any more? The unsecured mortgage value is still on the books as a debt, and the home-owner may be evicted, under the usual course of debtorship, as the mortgage-lender usually has legal right of return under default.
Did you catch it? The little trick there? Blink, and you miss it.
If I own, say, a diamond necklace, a bankruptcy court may order me to hand it over, under force of law, to cancel out some part of a debt to my creditor. Which it might very well do, if the only other item of value that I have, is a house; for taking away my shelter, in order to pay off part of a debt, makes me that much less able to pay the debt, now that I’m homeless; for the purpose of bankruptcy court is to mediate the best interests of both parties, both the creditor’s claim to my stuff, and my income, as well as the debtor’s claim to a continued productive life, both for my own pleasure, as well as the efficacious repayment of my debts.
Thus, a house held under mortgage is not, in the usual sense, “owned”, nor is it, in the jargon of credit, a “security deposit” for the loan that purchased it. Instead, it stands in the middle, having the most debtor-onerous properties of both, dispensing with the legal clarity of the former and the financial security of the latter.
Illuminating this situation– of the debtor holding a title to domestic property without the customary rights of ownership, of the creditor holding property in security without the customary debt-clearing effects of repossession– can only begin when we allow ourselves to question the semantics of “home ownership under a mortgage”.
A niggling distinction, this quibble over whether a mortgage truly enables you to “own your home”– a tiny little piece of semantic pedantry, until the usually unusual edge-case of a domicile being worth less on the market than its remaining principal became so common as to gain a house-hold term: an “underwater property”.
Then the distinction among * that which is owned, * that which secures a debt, and * that which falls in the crack between the two, becomes rather vital, and I prefer to not simplify “a property title under mortgage” from an “owned home”.
If you ban me from questioning the validity of “home ownership”, of teasing apart its propagandistic/marketing interpretation, then I will never be able to explicate my standpoint that the term obscures a deeply immoral, usurious practice in a cloak of righteous financial and personal progress.
It’s “just semantics”, after all.
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means, what you think it means.
– Inigo Montoya, Princess Bride
I’ve been writing about semantics for many paragraphs now, and yet, I wonder if we have the same concept of it?
On to my favorite game: giving a meaning to the word “semantics”; as, most glibly yet most truthfully, “semantics” means “meanings”.
At some point, philosophers, linguists, and other demi-professional nitpickers needed a word to describe the multi-faceted phenomenon that underpins our understanding of, well, pretty much anything, but, mostly, words.
Because we assign words meaning dependent on context– if you say “Johnny is being mean”, and I ask, “why do you think he’s being average?”, you might be confused, since you meant “mean” in the psychological sense, and I (perhaps peevishly) interpreted it in its mathematical meaning.
And yet, a “mean-ing” is neither a cruelty, nor an action of averageness. Words take on their meaning, or many ambiguous meanings, from situational context, sentence grammar, even verbal inflection.
It has been noted, for instance, that “fuck” has an effective usage standing in almost any grammatical position, while also taking on purposes ranging an impressive expressive gamut, from pleasure to pain, from vicious anger to joyous excitement.
“Semantics” earns itself a poor name, in the vernacular, for it is exactly the type of jargon one needs to express precise sentiments about the many meanings of “meaning”, when one means not to mean “meaning” in the mean sense.
But, contrary to its anti-intellectual drubbings, a “semantic” is, in any conversational situation, effectively equivalent to its vernacular, the good old notion of “meaning”.
Thus, whenever someone jeers, “that’s just semantics”, I stumble upon the shallowness of the assertion, for I know the meaning of “meanings”, which is to say, “semantics”, and they have spat upon me the dire dictate, that “that’s just meanings”.
Why yes, thank you for understanding what I’m getting at– I’m trying to establish the meaning of what in the world we’re talking about.
Whither, “just semantics”, then?
Clearly, my aggressive interlocutors don’t mean, themselves, to abuse me with the invective that what I’m saying is merely a “meaning”.
Nay, there’s another semantic going on here, hidden not in the semantics grammar, nor in the semantics of definition, but in context of conversational flow.
Let’s consider if, instead, the party in question had, instead, spat out “oh, fuck off”.
Depending on how we know each other, our aquaintance or friendship, and, within those constraints, the tonal delivery of the interjection, “oh, fuck off” could hold many different intended and interpreted meanings.
Hard to say, without the context and inflection– and perhaps still hard to say, even with context and inflection.
Judging by how the conversation usually goes, after the invocation of “just semantics”, I can infer that the intended meaning is more like “fuck off” as spoken to a marriage counselor who starts giving relationship advice to a random, stranger couple on the sidewalk, in the middle of a disagreement. A fundamental unwelcomeness.
My absolute favorite invocation of this was: * in a discussion over the boundaries of a particular sports game, * he asks me for a definition of the game, * to which I provide a fair estimate of the introduction of the most-used ruleset, * to which he spits, “that’s just semantics”
Yes, a definition gives a meaning, a meaning is a semantic; in providing a definition, as he asked me for, I was providing semantics. Moreover, though, I was, apparently, stating something that is just semantics; nothing more.
And here, I believe, I stare into the void that I have avoided.
Those who cannot stand the self-critical analysis of exploring our words, simply cannot, even when they ask for it themselves, accept a search for meaning.
Whether within ourselves, individually, or amongst ourselves, communally, addressing what is meant by our words, thoughts, and deeds, is the root of our search for meaning.
Pressing the hot, yet inoffensively dull, knife of logic into the pliable yet sensitive, advertising-soaked, propaganda-laden butter of the usual American mind, is to shock into life a nerve that has lived in an empty, dark void.
I don’t agree with the cast aspersion, “that’s just semantics”, in its context, or in its use, but I cast from myself any hate or rancor towards those who find themselves surprised and unprepared when, all of a sudden, they come face-to-face with a void of meaning they’ve been staring into their whole lives.