Is it me, or didn’t ‘oversight’ used to mean something you’d missed…of which you hadn’t taken account?

If so, how odd that in 2013 it means ‘regulatory monitoring’. Is this usage Freudian, or merely muddle? I’m not entirely sure. But what I notice more and more nowadays is that word usage is getting sloppy – especially in the area of society, economics, and politics. Perhaps more accurately, it’s being obfuscatory – sometimes, on purpose.

The ‘ist’ suffix is a classic example. Putting this at the end of a word meant somebody was of a certain bent, holding certain views to do with expertise in, and favourability towards/belief in, an activity or ideology. Hence, ventriloquist, feminist, columnist, anarchist etc.

Not any more. A feminist is a person who supports equal rights for women, but a racist is a person negative towards other races. An Islamist is a person who supports the beheading of anyone being rude about Islam, but an ageist is someone who thinks braindeath occurs at 50. A nationalist is someone generally tarred with the brush of xenophobia, but a sexist is anyone (always a man) who doesn’t like the opposite gender.

You see my point? Ageists should admire the old for their wisdom, and sexists should be keen on sex, but the words mean almost the opposite of that. I do think here that we are dealing with muddle, largely because almost all ‘ists’ were invented by, er, Leftists. Who on many of their own bases, if Leftist, should be anti-Left, but aren’t. If you follow.

A rapist is a person who prefers to skip the formalities of asking if it’s OK to have sex now, but perhaps it should be someone who abhors rape. What we’re lacking here is liberal consistency, and that’s nothing new.

‘Oversight’ on the other hand comes almost entirely from the American Right, and may well be Freudian, in that most of them (and their camp-followers in Europe) would just love to overlook every flaw in the human species and abolish every last rule up to and including Don’t Be Naughty. This gets us into the area of euphemism, which is not, by the way, uttered by euphemists as far as I know.

My own pet word for contemporary bromides is usefulisms, because for the inventors, that’s exactly what they are. Open bank reconciliation is a convenient alternative to grand larceny, as indeed Quantitative Easing is a seemingly benign description of taking our money and giving it to people who have more than enough already. The result is the same as the ‘ist’ thing: you’re left expecting one thing, and you get another (far less appealing) thing instead.

Nowhere is this more interminably confusing than in the discussion of ethnicity. It’s almost as if the downtrodden race was determined to make whitey feel awkward by perpetually moving the goalposts. Nigger is a word found offensive by black people, but used by American blacks among themselves all the time. There is a terrific stand-up (Dave Chapelle) you can catch on YouTube showing with enormous feeling and humour, however, why the word is offensive. But earlier this year, an older British entertainer was vilified for referring to ‘coloured people’…which in my youth was the word universally employed by politicians to demonstrate their liberal credentials.

Ali G was a boorishly crass black character invented by a Jew which, to all intents and purposes, was a racist depiction of young male West Indians. On the other hand, it was very funny, and extremely popular among young West Indian women because the crude sexism, they felt, was spot-on. Similarly, I still feel people flinch when I say the word “Jew” rather than use the ‘ish’ description. It’s very much about the tone in which one utters the word.

‘Ish’ itself is of course another of those confusing suffixes. In fact on the whole I think you could say I was ishist. ‘Ish’ comes from the German ‘isch’, and in that language means, very clearly, someone or something with a clearly defined charcteristic: ausländisch (foreign), mathematisch (mathematical), regnerisch (rainy) and so forth. But over time it has in English come to mean ‘a tendency towards’ or ‘that way’: fattish, tallish, and fiftyish are good examples.

But then you get Scottish, rakish, and fetish where there is no doubt at all. And come to think about it, saying I’m ishist might be taken to mean I hate ‘ish’, which isn’t true. I’m really ishistish.

Jonathan Miller hilariously played up the confusion by referring to himself in a 1960 sketch as “not really a Jew- more sort of Jewish”. There is indeed in English this never-ending desire not to offend – and it lies behind some of these word developments, suffixes and so on. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true: ‘fascist’ when I was at University came to mean “You disagree with me’. ‘Mysogynist’ is a word used by women when faced with outspoken men.

The suffix ‘phobe’ has in particular become the chosen suffix of the politically correct, and in being so has replaced ‘fascist’ as a sound demonstrating inccurate, generalised contempt for people who dare to speak out against pc. Islamaphobe is an idiotic term (there’s a lot to be frightened about in Islam today) and homophobe is just silly. I chap called me homophobic last week when I expressed opposition to gay marriage. I do not have a phobia about homosexuality, and I don’t know anyone who does.

Why having grave doubts about gay marriage represents an irrational fear eludes me. Serious phobia represents a mental illness, and here again there is a clue about the Left’s mindset: just as in Soviet Russia, dissidents were placed in mental institutions, so too anyone in the West not ‘progressive’ must be unhinged. The very use of the word ‘correct’ kind of gives the game away.

But that takes us straight back to the start again: language is used more and more now in a variously sloppy, dictatorial and deliberately misleading manner. It is the way the world is going, and while all languages must be allowed to develop organically, that process should also happen unconsciously….not because some harebrained Tory strategist thinks it might be a smart way to privatise the NHS.

Even The Slog’s signature word ‘bollocks’ has evolved over the last two decades. ‘The dog’s bollocks’ used to mean ‘obvious’ as in ‘like a sore thumb’; now it often means ‘terrific, the business’ – even being shortened to “It’s the bollocks”.

But fear not: I am a traditionalist, and I shall not have my bollocks interfered with, as it were. As my friend Jon is fond of saying, “It’s all bollocks and that’s official”.

Earlier at The Slog: