Understanding the Concept ‘Pogrom’ Via CS Lewis

Vox Populi

Wow Michael, …. referring here to the TPS essay.

An Act of Consciousness Raising: The Concept ‘Pogrom’ and its Extension to Sri Lanka

I find myself in complete agreement with you. We live in an age of genocide inflation or concept creep, where the definition of a word expands so broadly it loses its original meaning. To call the July 1983 violence a genocide is inappropriate; if left unchecked, we would indeed be forced to “invent another concept” just to describe much more extreme, systematic atrocities.

Romanians remove corpses of Jewish victims deported from Iași following pogrom

Your arguments remind me deeply of C.S. Lewis and his concept of “verbicide” (the murder of a word). Now there’s a great trio of terms to throw into the mix: genocide, verbicide, and pogrom. In his fantastic essay “The Death of Words,” which I have never forgotten, Lewis argued that one of the most common ways to murder a word is through inflation. This happens when people grab a word with strong emotional or moral weight and apply it to things that don’t fit the definition, simply because they want to express intense disapproval. Using “genocide” to describe an ethnic riot or localized massacre is exactly what Lewis would call linguistic inflation.

Your warning that we would be forced to invent another concept entirely perfectly mirrors Lewis’s exact frustration with language decay. He lamented that when descriptive words are hijacked as emotional badges, we destroy the vocabulary of definition. Lewis’s essay should be mandatory reading today because verbicide has become all too common. Take the word “terrorism”—it is also being systematically murdered. The lexicon has moved to terms like “information terrorist,” which Western governments use to silence critics. If we keep inflating language like this, we will wake up one day to find that eating scrambled eggs at the Galle face Hotel has been declared a terrorist act and an act of genocide. Scrambled eggs are just so evil!

I was also fascinated by your defence of the word “pogrom,” because your argument there is the exact inverse of your rejection of “genocide.” Touché, Michael. I love it. Here, the issue is not over-inflating a word, but under-inflating or freezing it in history. Scholars like K.M. de Silva trap the word inward within a frozen, 19th-century definition, acting as if it can only apply to Jews in Tsarist Russia. You are rightly fighting to expand the word so it can be used as a functional sociological concept today.

The meanings of words are not frozen in time. Think about the word “gay.” Once upon a time, it meant carefree and bright. Over time, it came to mean leading an unconventional lifestyle, and by the mid-20th century, the meaning narrowed specifically to describe homosexuality. While that is a natural semantic shift rather than the deliberate verbicide Lewis warned about, it proves that word meanings must change. However, that natural evolution does not justify over-inflating emotionally charged words like genocide, terrorism, or fascism—the latter of which is bandied about these days for things that have absolutely nothing to do with real fascism.

By pushing back against the inflation of “genocide” and pushing forward against the freezing of “pogrom,” you are finding a vital conceptual middle ground. It is a perfect real-world example of trying to prevent the very “death of words” you highlighted.

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You may like to check out C.S. Lewis’s book Studies in Words (1960), which expands on the themes of his 1944 essay. It makes for a fascinating read on how single words have changed in meaning over centuries.

Lewis believed that if you muddy language, you muddy human thought. He once said: “Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.” For Lewis, fighting for the precise meaning of words was a moral duty to prevent the manipulation of truth by lies and propaganda.

George Orwell followed up on Lewis’s 1944 essay with Politics and the English Language (1946), which I remember still being read by students doing philosophy at Monash in the 1990s. Both men realized that governments and ideologues during World War II were intentionally inflating words like “fascism” or “democracy” to turn them into purely emotional weapons—a practice Western political leaders still continue today, but far worse.

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