Words have meanings, people have labels

It is getting worse by the day and has created a humanitarian and political crisis.

Queensland and NSW are battling record floods and cities like Lismore have mostly disappeared under the deluge.

COVID-19 is still ever present, but people are trying to rebuild their lives and businesses and get on with things.

Meanwhile, others are tacking the big issues, like words.

Pension is the latest target, specifically because you can be young, have a disability and be in receipt of a pension, which apparently has the nasty effect of “labelling” people as, wait for it, old.

Yep, lots of old people, who probably resent being labelled as much as any other group, receive a pension.

For a start, the older I get the less I care. Age is just a number.

As for pension, it has a clear etymology; the Latin pendere (to pay) and pension (payment).

It means payment, and is exactly that in the context of our system of social support.

In late middle English a pension was a regular sum paid to retain allegiance, a retainer in turbulent times.

Samuel Johnson, the English, poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer, tackled the word during his decade-long odyssey to create the first dictionary of the English language, which was published in 1755.

It would turn out to be the most important and influential English dictionary ever published and sits alongside the French and Italian dictionaries as master works and national treasures.

Ladislav Zgusta, in his weighty book, History, Languages and Lexicographers, describes Johnson as having a “sense of exactness and elegance” in his definitions, particularly of words derived from other languages.

Zgusta uses Johnson’s treatment of pension to illustrate the point.

Johnson put pension in its simplest form and attached no connotation to it defining it as: An allowance made to any one without equivalent.

The use of ‘without equivalent’ is taken to mean without exception.

So, from the outset, pension is defined in the English language as a fair and just payment.

The word is not the problem.

The suggestion is that the Disability Support Pension should be changed to Disability Support Payment.

By definition, they are one and the same.

It is worth noting that seven years after his book was published, Johnson received a Royal pension.

He didn’t like it either because he was a Jacobite, who believed that the Stuart Dynasty still had legitimate title to the throne of England.

He also worried about the connotation he would blindly follow the dictates of his paymaster and patron.

He tackled the issue of the label, not the word, by saying the pension was for work already done not future works.

Darren Linton is chief correspondent at McPherson Media Group