THE WORD THAT ATE ITSELF

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There was a time, or so the story goes, when a word like terrorist pointed at something specific: the deliberate targeting of civilians to spread fear for political ends. It was a word with teeth, meant for the rare and the monstrous. Somewhere along the way, the word slipped its leash.

Now watch how it moves. A grandmother chains herself to a pipeline and is called a terrorist. A journalist photographs a burning building from the wrong angle and is called a terrorist. A trans teenager exists in public and is called a terrorist by people who have never met them. Indigenous land defenders stand between a bulldozer and a sacred river and the news calls them insurgents, extremists, a threat to public safety…while the machinery, backed by armed men with badges and no name tags, rolls on with the full protection of the state.

Meanwhile, the word grows silent in the mouths that should use it most. When violence wears a uniform, when it comes with a warrant, when it is filmed on a body camera and the footage is withheld or cams are purposefully turned off, we reach for softer language…incident, use of force, isolated. The label that would demand accountability is reserved, almost tenderly, for use by the powerful. The label that manufactures fear and justifies the crushing of dissent is handed down to whoever is inconvenient this week: the protester, the migrant, the woman who says no too loudly, the person whose body doesn’t fit the shape the room was built for.

This isn’t linguistic drift. It’s function. A word this elastic isn’t broken…it’s working exactly as intended. Stretched wide enough, it can cover anyone. Aimed carefully enough, it never touches the ones who hold the guns.

So here is a small act of refusal: to notice, out loud, when the word is being used as a weapon instead of a description. To ask, every time…terrorized whom? by whom? and who benefits from us not asking? Language is one of the last commons we have. It’s worth defending, the same way we’d defend a river, a forest, a body. Because once a word can mean anything, it can be turned on anyone…and history says it eventually will be.

~Freyja Inanna

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