[Ads-l] DOTY candidate--"the unhuman"

[Laurence Horn]

I know we don’t have a category for Dysphemism of the Year, so I’ll just have to enter “unhuman”, n. In the general WOTY sweepstakes.  Unless there’s an election-related subgroup.  The new book _Unhumans_ by Jack Posobiec (with Joshua Lisek), blurbed by JD Vance, and getting favorable play from other leading Republicans, has been in the news lately for its potentially controversial position that liberals (progressives, leftists, whatever) are not actually human. To quote Michelle Goldberg’s Op-Ed in today’s NYT,

The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/jd-vance-fascism-unhumans.html

This is of particular interest to those of us who have been following the un-noun during its increased productivity since the promotion of 7-Up as the uncola (1968). For the most part, an unX is either something just outside the domain of X but sharing properties with members of that category (an uncola, an unturkey made of soy protein) or a peripheral member of the category X lacking some core features, i.e. an unconventional member of the set X (an uncollege, an unbank, an unpolitician). These often have a neutral or even positive affect, signaling a welcome liberation from uncongenial constraints. Posobiec et al.’s use of “unhuman” as a strongly negative category is more reminiscent of the earlier coinage of “unperson” for someone whose existence has been eliminated, although without the revaluation (since an Orwellian unperson started out as a person): 

OED: 
unperson [introduced by George Orwell]
A person who, usu. for political misdemeanour, is deemed not to have
existed and whose name is removed from all public records. In extended
use, a person whose existence or achievement is officially denied or
disregarded; a person of no political or social importance.
Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson.
(1949 G. Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four, 159)
Beria is already an "unperson," the record of his career "unfacts."
(1954 Economist 18 Sept. 883/2)


Or “unhuman” may be a counterpart of German un-nouns with strong negative affect, in particular Unmensch (‘unperson’) “a monster, brute”. (An Unwort is a non-word or ugly word (including a politically suspect euphemism), and an Unsatz, per Wittgenstein, is a semantically ill-formed sentence like Moore’s “It’s raining out but I don’t think it is”.)

The OED has entries for adjectival “unhuman” (a rival of “inhuman”) and verbal “unhuman” (a nonce form from the 17th c.), but no nominal “unhuman”, so Posobiec may deserve the credit (if that’s the appropriate term) for the coinage. 

Of course this comes from the party whose leader regularly refers to migrants and asylum seekers as “vermin”, so maybe it’s not too surprising.    

LH





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