"Le mot, c'est moi"
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"Why the president must not be lexicographer-in-chief", The Economist 5/30/2025:
ON MAY 28TH a specialist American court for international trade struck down many of Donald Trump’s tariffs. It did so on several legal grounds, including linguistic ones. As in so many cases, the two sides in the case presented different views on what several words mean. The next day another court temporarily stayed the decision. The tariffs remain in effect but the legal question remains.
Many of the tariffs rest on a law Congress passed in 1977, giving the president the authority to “regulate” aspects of American trade “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat”. The first court found that “regulate” did not include the power to impose tariffs. Tariffs are not mentioned anywhere in the relevant parts of the law. The Trump administration naturally disagreed. Under such a view “regulate” would mean what the president says it does, a worrisome precedent. […]
Reconsider “any unusual and extraordinary threat”. The “and” makes clear that both tests of “unusual” and “extraordinary” must be met. Are America’s trade deficits either? They are not: America last ran a trade surplus in goods when Led Zeppelin were at the height of their powers, in 1973. The worst years for the trade balance, as a share of GDP, were in the middle of the George W. Bush administration, two decades ago; the deficit has shrunk as a share of the economy since.
You should read the whole thing, if you're a subscriber , or a subscriber gives you a gift link (which unfortunately is only good for reading by one person), or if your library gives you access.
The article mentions several other recent cases where the meaning of words in crucial, including whether gang activities by Tren de Agua constitute an "invasion or predatory incursion […] perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government” that would trigger the 1798 Alien Enemies Act; and the old question of what "bear arms" should be taken to mean.
The article's last paragraph:
Pinning down what a word means is far harder than most people realise. Dictionaries will never be perfect. Big data is better but will be subject to argumentation and interpretation. But the simple fact is that the arbiter of meaning cannot be the president, himself also a litigant in so many cases. If the Supreme Court’s justices grant any president such authority, they would hand over not only Congress’s power but much of their own, with dire consequences.
Many previous posts have started from the (obvious) premise that much statutory, contractual, and constitutional interpretation depends on the meaning of words and phrases as well as on the nature of relevant facts and their provenance. But I don't think we've previously addressed the idea that the traditionally judicial answers to such questions, in the U.S. anyhow, could or should be taken over by the executive branch.
Mai Kuha said,
May 31, 2025 @ 8:42 am
My impression is that the discourse style of the political right in the U.S. relies heavily on presupposition and conversational implicature, often not explicitly stating arguments with all dots fully connected. If so, I wonder whether this means that judicial insistence on normal lexical semantics will stump them, or that, to the contrary, they will simply sidestep this notion of words having established meanings.
Philip Anderson said,
May 31, 2025 @ 2:50 pm
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
It would seem that Winnie the Pooh is not the only storybook character on the world stage.
JPL said,
May 31, 2025 @ 6:43 pm
This discussion would be more productive if the Humpty Dumpty Principle were explicitly stated: the meaning of any word in the lexicon is whatever I choose it to be on the given occasion. If the meaning of the word on the current occasion is contradictory to the meaning that word had on a previous occasion, that difference is to be ignored. Trump could not state this principle, or any other principle (is there a counter-example to this claim?), but it describes the principle Trump is actually going on. The sentence in the article, "Under such a view “regulate” would mean what the president says it does, a worrisome precedent." is ambiguous, but the following possibilities are contained in it. (1) "what the president says it does" refers to the use of the word on a particular previous occasion, in which case that claim would require support by reasons and evidence, and it assumes the existence of a constant principle, belonging to the norms for the language, that determines, for any potential referent, whether that (intentional) object can be integrated to the category or not. (2) The Humpty Dumpty Principle, according to which there is no such constant principle existing in the norm outside the particular use and the intention of the speaker. The speaker's whim is to be imposed and enforced on the addressees by superior power. Trump has no understanding of anything like a general principle existing independently of him, and basically he is a solipsist. So, taking the claim in sense (1) is not so worrisome, since it is resolvable by rational argument, but accepting Trump's claim with no good reason would be a "worrisome precedent", since it implies rejecting sense (1) and accepting sense (2). It would be worrisome more generally because it would imply willingness to accept the principle of whim and power and reject the principles of the determination of truth by rational argument, but the courts currently are upholding the latter.
And, as Mai Kuha suggests, there is a general problem with the way the Trumpist Republican party uses language, since often a claim they have made can be refuted by appealing to the preexisting norms of the language as to what the "integrative principle" is for a given word (lexeme). (And sometimes the meaning they would like the word to have is the opposite of what the meaning of that word actually is, which is an objective question.)
Philip Taylor said,
June 1, 2025 @ 5:14 am
It is surely not an accident that "worrisome precedent" and "worrisome president" are so similar in sound …
Julian said,
June 1, 2025 @ 6:27 pm
I recall Peter Bichsel's short story 'A table is a table' – a staple of elementary German classes.
It concerns an eccentric loner who, for something to do, decided to redefine all the words he used.
The thing you lie down on to go to sleep became 'picture'.
The thing you sit at to eat your meals became 'rug'. And so on.
The story had a sad ending: he could not longer communicate with people.