Redefining words

So politicians are now redefining marriage as a union between any two people, and pollution now includes CO2, a gas essential to all life. What next?
Maybe they'll include death as a form of life. That should produce some interesting results. And exam passes could include failures?

Once you change the meaning of words then anything becomes possible, except in actual reality. For example you can extend the legal definition of any word to mean whatever the government wants, but you can still never consummate a gay marriage. They could redefine cancer to include warts, and then say they'd managed to cure 80% of cancers. Would they be right or wrong?

Basically once you start altering the official meaning of any word, the actual thing it referred to must by definition remain the same, so calling a cat a type of dog will never manage to get them to interbreed, as although the new cat is called a dog in law it still will not be able to do anything different to what it could when the word reflected the actual difference. Even blurring the edges a little, like raising the number of people who can pass an exam doesn't make the extra ones any cleverer, it just makes the exam less representative of academic performance.

This is nothing to do with politics. Gay people wanting a legal partnership is something they campaigned for and got, in the form of a civil partnership. Not marriage, simply as the definition of marriage was a lifetime union between a man and a woman, which came with the added condition of consummation through sexual intercourse, or the contract would be void. Forget having children or not, as that is not compulsory, but having different chromosomes is the expected requirement combined with exploiting the results of those differences in a marriage. Something which cannot be possible for the same sexes. So the governments simply said 'that's not a problem, words are flexible so we'll change the meaning of them to keep up with a changing society.'. Of course in marriage this opens the door to groups, incest and animals at the very least, and technically once you've set a precedent to alter the meaning of whatever you like to fit an agenda, someone else with an agenda will then come along and using that precedent as their basis, campaign for their own to then be fulfilled.

Technically it does not have an end. Taking any new idea to its extreme conclusion will show you the potential of starting a new thread. Tax something for the first time at 1% and most people will barely react or notice, like parking in your own street. Then once they've had a year or to to forget about it charge properly at market rate or above and then it's too late to stop. I would imagine newspeak, taking a recognised word with a fixed meaning and altering it to fit something the government want it to was described by Orwell and with CO2 pollution set in stone by Obama, followed by gay marriage spreading across the world like Asian Flu, as if one country sneezed the law out and the wind spread it around the world, means technically no institution or definition is any longer safe. Certainly for me if someone had suggested people of the same sex would be able to become married like anyone else I'd have said there are some boundaries which even modern governments couldn't cross. How wrong I was. Nothing is now sacred, governments who still practice discrimination could in theory label any group they wanted as either favoured or persona non grata, because they have defined who they are by diktat. Like the gypsies killed during the last war, a country could decide who were gypsies (much like Switzerland currently is doing against asylum seekers), and just as Hitler included many non-Jewish people as Jews who had a single Jewish grandparent but not the correct one, you could then get distant relatives and the like of actual gypsies and spread the definition as widely as you wanted to.

Like all or any other power, it is neutral until used. Whether you think gay marriage or calling CO2 pollution is good or bad, wait till the next redefinition. It has the potential to allow governments now to simply change the meaning of anything to fit what they want to do, and make it law so the previous meaning is simply wiped out at a signature. They have done this twice now, and the world is currently divided over the merits of both decisions. But they are extremely unlikely to stop there, why would they now they've managed it successfully twice at the very least?