When words don't mean things.

Of late it has come to my attention that the word "liberal" has become a bad thing among some of the fruitier fruitbats of the Left.

Today we hear from pollsters that "liberal" does not mean the same thing when Millennials say it as it does when their Boomer parents say it.

Millennials use language differently than Boomers and Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980). In the Reason-Rupe poll, about 62% of Millennials call themselves liberal. By that, they mean the favor gay marriage and pot legalization, but those views hold little or no implication for their views on government spending. To Millennials, being socially liberal is being liberal, period. For most older Americans, calling yourself a liberal means you want to increase the size, scope, and spending of the government (it may not even mean you support legal pot and marriage equality). Despite the strong liberal tilt among Millennials, 53% say they would support a candidate who was socially liberal and fiscally conservative (are you listening, major parties?).

 What they mean when they say "liberal" is "libertarian". As in, "stop taxing me and get out of my face Big Brother!"

There are other areas where language doesn't track neatly with Boomer and Gen X definitions. Millennials have no first-hand memories of the Soviet Union or the Cold War. Forty-two percent say they prefer socialism as a means of organizing society but only 16% can define the term properly as government ownership of the means of production. In fact, when asked whether they want an economy managed by the free market or by the government, 64% want the former and just 32% want the latter. Scratch a Millennial "socialist" and you are likely to find a budding entrepreneur (55% saying they want to start their own business someday). Although they support a government-provided social safety net, two-thirds of Millennials agree that "government is usually inefficient and wasteful" and they are highly skeptical toward government with regards to privacy and nanny-state regulations about e-cigarettes, soda sizes, and the like.

But, due to the continual destruction of the English language by the Left, nobody knows what anyone is talking about. "Conservative" used to mean somebody who wanted to conserve government power and privilege to the crown and the noble class, these days it means somebody who resists unlawful government tyranny. Pretty much a full 180 degree inversion of meaning.

"Liberal" likewise has become inverted, deliberately, but lately its getting inverted again to approach its original meaning. Furthermore the Kewl Kids of the New Left are using liberal as a term of disparagement, to draw a line between themselves and the old-school Boomer Left with their ever-more ridiculous parsing of sexuality into 57 different varieties.

What goes around, comes around.