Polymantics

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean."  -- Humpty Dumpty

"I never said that." -- Donald in Wonderland

   Implied threats and suggestions to potential violence against political opponents is a common tactic used by the current president.
   He leaves just enough semantic wiggle room so he can claim he didn't really say any such thing, and if someone did hear such an inference, he can say it was just a joke, and he's not responsible for the actions of others who can't take a joke or don't know sarcasm when they hear it.
   As if that alone is enough to excuse what to most listeners is incitement to violence -- a criminal offense.
   Example: Labeling a source of a whistleblower's warning on presidential  behavior "next to a spy," adding that we all know what was done to spies "in the old days."
   Inference: Spies were shot.
   Implied suggestion: Someone should shoot the person who contributed to the whistleblower's report, and probably also the whistleblower.
   By using such inferences, hints, suggestions, or "jokes," the president can claim he never said someone should shoot the whistleblower.
   Technically, no, he didn't. But many listeners won't see the difference, just as other listeners will take references to shooting a traitor as a suggestion or a recommendation, or even presidential permission.
   Similarly, at a campaign rally, the candidate said a protestor should be beaten up, and that he would post bail.
   References and comments like that, although technically innocent, are often heard and interpreted as instructions to do the very thing referenced.
   To avid listeners and supporters, subtle references like that are taken to be direct instructions, and are phrased that way only as protection.
   Another tactic, of course, is to deny having said what is clearly recorded and heard by bystanders and replayed on television repeatedly.
   Call it semantic word games, or polymantics, insisting that a word or word doesn't really mean what historically it has meant for decades or longer, but now means what the user says it means, and listeners can't know what a word means until and unless the user explains it.
   And if listeners point out that a word already has a certain meaning, the user insists, "I never said that," or "What I really meant was ... "
   In Wonderland, Alice responded that "The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things."
   "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
   So in the Washington Wonderland that we see today, words have many different meanings, and members of Congress must now choose whether to accept the sudden new meaning, or to rely on the meaning they have known and accepted for many years.
   Or as the president's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said, "Truth isn't truth." And the White House relies on what presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway called "alternative facts."
   There is always a choice.