In these polarizing times, words that used to define civil society and social justice are being put to work for a completely different political agenda. Or they are being bleached of their meaning as the values they represent are mocked and distorted.
As co-host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens, Carol Off spent a decade and a half talking to people in the news five nights a week. On top of her stellar writing and reporting career, those 25,000 interviews have given her a unique vantage point on the crucial subject at the heart of her new book.
I spent a good portion of a weekend enthralled with Carol Off’s At A Loss For Words. Off grapples with the ways language is being weaponized and manipulated.
Language
From the introduction,
“The radical right, populist campaign succeeds by identifying an enemy who is displacing the real people, stealing their position and society destroying their traditions.”
There are wedges being driven between groups or demographics to make them feel that they can’t get along, they can’t trust the other, that there are shadow forces working against their interests.
These wedges are manufactured for political purposes and Off call out leaders.
“We need our leaders to have compassion, to have the fortitude and steadiness necessary to resist the ‘us versus them’, fear mongering, and the courage to reject the offer of easy solutions to complex problems. We need politicians and a political class capable of imagining a society that works for most people.” Page 311
I don’t want to live in a world of normalized rage. Off is optimistic that we can imagine more for ourselves and our societies. But we are running out of time.
Six Words
Her book is not a linguistic critique or a political thesis. She structured her writing around six familiar words:
Freedom
Democracy
Truth
Woke
Choice
Taxes
She employs each word as a jumping-off point to both dissect the history of and present context around ideas like fascism, dissolution, demagoguery, and the politics of information.
Or disinformation.
Danger
“If our language doesn’t have a means to express an idea, then the idea itself is gone—even the range of thought is diminished.”
And, as she argues, that’s a dangerous loss.
“The danger isn’t that you start to believe lies. The danger is that you can’t tell what’s true or not anymore, and you don’t know what’s fact and what’s false… people don’t know what is reliable. They don’t know what information they can trust. And when you can’t trust, you can’t have social cohesion.”
Off weaves in stories of her formative years and her parent’s influence on her thinking. She even squeezes in a reference to how Catholic Pentecostalism shaped her father’s worldview in his latter years.
History, Democracy, Truth
“Freedom, democracy, truth: these are weather worn words with history and heft.”
“Truth dies in darkness.” (page 117)
And there is a lot of darkness shrouding her six words. I’ll address three of them.
1. Off points out that freedom in America was never inclusive. Slaves and women weren’t truly free or equal. Even the civil rights advances of the 60s and 70s couldn’t be sustained and today the right of women to vote is under threat.
Freedom, once “the clarion call of people who were oppressed,” has since been co-opted by “the hard right,” citing anti-vaccine convoys in Canada and Donald Trump supporters storming U.S. capitol as examples.
2. She clarifies that when she uses the term, “liberal democracy,” it’s not a partisan liberal. It’s the idea of “inclusion, of a government that is taking care of everyone, whether they voted for them or not, because the law requires them to do that.”
Democracy as we know it is threatened by the rise of authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism, and the alt-right.
3. Truth is the foundation of our social relationships.
Truth is based on facts. In 2025, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness,” meaning “truth without pesky facts.” The American Dialect Society chose it as their word of 2025. (page 107)
Prolific lying has become a political sport and organizations are keeping score. The editors of PolitiFact dubbed 2025 the “Year of the Lies.” PolitiFact tracked over 30,000 lies in Trump’s first term and described his lies in 2025 as at a “staggering frequency.” Lying isn’t to convince people of the lies, it’s to break down the ability to figure out what is true and false.
Off references Orwell’s, 1984, in which a Ministry of Truth proliferates slogans such as “Freedom is Slavery” and Ignorance is Strength” to destroy the idea that anything is true.
1984 is now.
Warning In A 7th Word
In a 2025 interview with Richard Warnica for Hazlitt, an award-winning magazine, Off warns,
“What we’re seeing… is this extraordinary rhetoric of hate. And it’s fascistic… the speeches that we’re hearing… which demonize the other, demonize immigrants, preach this idea that we have to round them up and deport them—the language they are using is fascistic.”
Off makes a chilling observation that foreshadows what is happening in Alberta and in Conservative politics in 2026. When asked about an addendum to the paperback version of her book she replied,
“I believe that the word of 2025 will be the word ‘immigrant.’ And if I was going to do a sequel, the number one word would be ‘immigrant’.”
That word caught my attention. Is it coincidental that “immigrant” is the focus referendum questions to be presented to Albertans in October 2026?
“We’ve thought about ‘immigrant’ as being something positive. Everybody in Canada, except Indigenous people, comes from an immigrant background. We’ve looked at it as multiculturalism, as diversity, as newcomers, as state builders. That’s how immigration has been seen. Now it is going to be a dirty word. It’s going to be ‘migrants and ‘aliens’ and ‘the other’ and ‘The Great Replacement’ and ‘vermin’ and all these things. It will become something that’s negative.”
I’m writing a follow-up piece on immigrants in Alberta. Watch for it.
In the meantime, please join the conversation and post a comment below. What do you think of Off’s perspective on words? Have you seen evidence of a rhetoric of hate in Alberta or Canada?
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