1 a : the state or condition of being entitled
1 b : a right to benefits specified especially by law or contract
2 : a government program providing benefits to members of a specified group; also : funds supporting or distributed by such a program
entitle; entitled; entitling
1 : to give a title to : designated
2 : to furnish with proper grounds [e. g.: the right WHS] for seeking or claiming something
The preceding definitions are from Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th Edition) and are somewhat more fuzzy than definitions of those terms were in dictionaries from about a hundred years ago or so. Although already then the distinction of the two meanings of the word “title” were becoming somewhat fuzzy, it was quite clear then that the “title” in “entitle” related to rights, to the rights of people but not to the “rights” of things, inanimate objects or even of animals.
Today that distinction is gone. It has not been eradicated or been declared invalid. It has become obfuscated and nebulous. That concerns me and should concern all.
Language is flexible and evolves. Sometimes that evolution reflects and follows real life and usage of words, but when it comes to dictionaries, especially a somewhat politically-correct and feminist-ideology-controlled dictionary like Merriam Webster’s, changes in language do not follow real life, they are used to influence and shape real life. For instance, take the word “misandry”, as opposed to the word “misogyny” (hatred of men and women, respectively)
Although the term misogyny has been around for about 350 years in the English language and has for many years been defined in dictionaries, the definition of misandry has not, even after having been defined for about 20 years or more, made it into a politically-correct dictionary like Merriam Webster’s Dictionary. That is despite of many people having made the feminists at Merriam Webster’s aware of the fact that hatred of men is very real in our society, that it has been around for as long as civilization (and perhaps even before that), and that the term misandry was put into use decades ago to identify that not only women can be object of hatred, but that men can be and are the targets of hatred as well (to a far greater extent, because women and especially feminists do not labour under anything like men’s handicap of Western Chivalry).
That is not a trivial problem. The consequences of Merriam Webster’s persistent refusal to recognize that misandry are a fact of human existence and deadly to men. About 250 million men in the world are dead that would still be alive if misandry and anti-male discrimination did not exist. At least a few million men would not have met their untimely demise if Merriam Webster’s Dictionary would have given recognition for the last 20 or more years that hatred of men exists, that it is deadly and that it should be designated misandry.
Although the misuse of the term “entitled” is by far not as deadly as is the refusal of the fact of misandry, it is the collective consequences of the watering-down and revisioning of definitions of terms in our language (in fact, in the languages of all developed nations) according to and as part of the feminist agenda for stressing women’s plight and of downplaying and denying men’s plight that are exceedingly deadly to men. There can be no argument over the importance of such obfuscation.
For example, a title becomes part of a name if the bearer of the title received the legal right (as in the case of “Lord” in Lord Beaverbrook) to use it or, if the bearer earned the right make the title part of his name, such as in the case of Dr. Albert Schweitzer or anyone else who earned a university degree at that level of education (although since the feminists got to control the curriculum it seems that the term Ph.D. is now no longer worth as much as it once was).
Individuals can therefore be entitled, but inanimate objects cannot be, as inanimate objects are unable to earn rights, to have them assigned or to exercise them.
Although various inanimate things and writings, such as essays, newspaper articles, movies, chapters in book, books themselves, data tables, paintings, and so on… usually have names that are called titles, they cannot have any rights. Therefore they are not and cannot ever become entitled!
The distinction between entitlements and names is clear, but not to all people, not even to people who are renowned for writing lengthy essays and even books that criticize the quality of our education system, not to many university-educated people, and not even to some of the smartest people we have on hand, Nobel-Prize winners.
Those concerns of mine over the many abuses of the term “entitled” are not trivial in connection with all other deliberate re-engineering of our languages. It is time to roll back the tide. It is time for the pendulum to swing the other way. Feminists have had their way with our languages for far too long. Let us begin to change things into the direction of including men’s rights in our languages.
Changes happen a step at a time, just as the language police took many, many steps before they got the power to control and change our languages.
Let’s begin with “entitled”:
- My name is Walter Schneider. That is not my title, but I do have the right to that name and am entitled to carry and use it.
- Men and women are both entitled to the same level of social comfort. To deny men that level of comfort and to give more to women is discriminatory and a violation of men’s rights.
- Men and women are entitled to equal average life spans. It is a violation of men’s rights to shorten their live expectancies by five years (that is the average gender gap in the life expectancies of the two sexes in the whole world, and, contrary to feminist propaganda, there are no controlling biological but only social causes for that discriminatory consequence).
- A man has the constitutional right to be judged by a jury of his peers, but in child-custody and divorce proceeding that right has become abrogated. Nevertheless, men are constitutionally entitled to jury trials. Just because the abrogation of jury trials for men speeds up the dissolution of marriages and the issuing of court orders that deny men their paternal rights does not mean that men lost those constitutional rights and the constitutional right to jury trials. Men are still entitled to paternal rights and to jury trials, even if they are no longer permitted to exercise or to enjoy those rights..
Anyone who reads this commentary can easily come up with hundreds of examples of the abrogation of men’s entitlements to rights. I could go on for hours and many days with listing many more of men’s entitlements that became abrogated by “law”.
The term “entitled” is a very important one for men, but the value of that term has become watered down to the extent that many people, even people in influential positions, no longer can tell the difference between an individual being entitled and a book or newspaper article being named or called by its title.
A man is entitled to many things, but a book is entitled to none. A man may have the right to a title and thus be entitled to make the title part of his name, but a book can only have a title and will not ever be entitled with a name or even be entitled to one. A book’s title is assigned by the book’s author (and often by the author’s publisher, just as there are people amongst newspaper employees who do nothing other than write headlines for articles). He does not entitle the book, he names it. Newspaper articles are not ever “entitled”, they are headlined.
To use phrases like “He concludes his article (to be published in a book entitled Just living together: Implications of cohabitation for children, families, and social policy) is a watering-down of men’s and women’s entitlements, of their rights. It puts the rights of men and women on an equal footing with those of inanimate things. To state in that case “…in a book whose title is…” is a far more adequate differentiation of people’s rights and entitlements to those rights from the name of a book. That prevents the drive towards normalizing men’s rights down to the lowest common denominator and thereby the devaluation of those rights.
Are those concerns trivial to you? Of such little things came the feminists’ rise to control and power. If nothing else, the feminists proved one thing, namely that language determines the way we think, and that the way we think determines how we act, but most importantly, that if we let someone deliberately change our language we will let them change our lives. That causes us to lose our rights (and, in the case of men, few of our duties).