There’s a short video of Jose Luis Borges in which the legendary writer expounds, surprisingly perhaps, on the peerless greatness of the English language. If I remember correctly, he’s being interviewed by Bill Buckley; although thankfully that prissy old queen doesn’t say much. The video does the rounds on Twitter fairly regularly.
English is such a great language, far more so even than the writer’s native Spanish, Borges explains, because it contains multitudes. There is always more than one word for the same thing, allowing the wordsmith to convey different meanings through his careful choice from the word-hoard. One word might be taken from the roots of the language, in the earthy Germanic soil, and the other from the ornate Latin superstructure that was built on top of it by the medieval Church and England’s new French-speaking rulers after 1066.
“Ghost” and “spirit” are a good example, which of course are synonyms but have very different meanings and associations. If you talk about the “Holy Ghost,” you aren’t referring to the same solemn, far more otherworldly thing that is the Latin-derived “Holy Spirit”—even though you actually are.
Another greatness of the English language, Borges says, again without parallel in other languages, is its flexibility, especially the ability to modify verbs with prepositions and to create totally new meanings almost at will.
You can knock someone up, you can knock them down a peg, you can knock them out, you can knock them about, you can knock them for six… and so on.
The differences in meaning can be subtle or profound, simply by changing the preposition attached to the verb.
The differences can also be political. Very political. This is a lesson we all should have learned during the pandemic, when the substitution of one preposition for another was used, quite literally, to disguise and justify the imposition of a medical tyranny and everything that followed: confinement, censorship, mandatory vaccination—all of it.
Those two prepositions were “from” and “with.”
Perhaps you remember when the media, medical establishment and government started talking about deaths with COVID-19 rather than deaths from COVID-19? It happened overnight, without warning. I remember it well. One evening the BBC was talking about deaths from COVID-19, and the next it was talking about deaths with COVID-19. The two things were obviously not the same.
Of course, you had to be paying attention to notice. As we know, most people weren’t. They were too busy binge-watching Netflix and ordering DoorDash to care.
Still, it was a significant change and it was used to inflate the seriousness of the virus massively. Now a positive result with a notoriously inaccurate test within 28 days of death counted as a death caused by the virus. Just like that, COVID was killing many, many more people than it had been, which then justified the ongoing social restrictions, the censorship, the ceaseless propaganda, the jabs and the firing and ostracism for those who wouldn’t comply.
Exactly how many people were wrongly classified as casualties of COVID-19 hasn’t been clear until now. The assumption has always been that the numbers were exaggerated significantly, but now, thanks to a new study out of Greece, we know that perhaps half of all deaths attributed to COVID-19 may actually have had nothing to do with it.
Researchers looked at records for 530 deaths in seven hospitals in Athens between January and August 2022, during the Omicron “wave” of the virus. They found that about half of all deaths attributed to the virus should not have been. These were deaths with COVID-19 where the virus made no clear contribution to “the chain of events leading to death.”
Just 25% of all deaths recorded as COVID deaths could be verified as being directly linked to the virus, and a further 30% occurred among people whose death the virus had clearly contributed to.
That left 45% of deaths with COVID that simply had nothing to do with the virus. No link between death and the virus could be established.
Such a margin of error cannot plausibly be explained away as accidental.
The study had other interesting findings too. It showed that patients who died with the virus were more likely to be young and to be suffering from immunosuppression and other serious, usually fatal, conditions like end-stage liver failure. Patients who died from the virus were much older. And patients who contracted COVID in the hospital and then died were 130% more likely to be misclassified as having died from COVID. Something very strange was happening in hospitals.
If I were Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in charge of Health and Human Services, I’d commission similar research in the US. Don’t let critics say, “Oh that was just Greece. Things were different here, in America.” They weren’t. Things were exactly the same. Maybe they were even worse, because the stakes were even higher. The pandemic created the conditions that allowed the 2020 election to be stolen.
It’s the perfect time. Attitudes are changing towards the pandemic, including in the academic world. The Greek study was published in a top journal by Springer Nature, the world’s largest and most respected publisher of academic science papers. Stuff that just wouldn’t have been published even a year or two years ago—stuff that might actually have got researchers in serious trouble and impacted their chances of maintaining a job—is now within science’s Overton Window.
If I were still Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I got to do a second thing, I’d go further. I’d do whatever it took to make sure the experts in charge of science and public health could never play with language like that again. New reporting requirements. A strict set of guidelines for defining disease morbidity—something. Don’t let them twist words.
Don’t let them lie.
First it was deaths with COVID-19 instead of from it. If we’re not careful, it will be deaths with bird flu not from it, or deaths with Disease X or whatever unholy gain-of-function project they’re putting through humanized mice in a Chinese lab somewhere—and before we know it we’ll be re-running the pandemic again. Lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations—the lot.
And all because we just weren’t paying attention to our four-letter words. As the old proverb has it, look after the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.