44. "Marginalize"

 

"Marginalized" is a complaint word that carries a lot of trouble in its root, which calls up a geometric shape, something with a center and edges. The trouble appears as soon as you get more than one complaint. How many people or groups can occupy the center? You can't have everybody  there. Is there a geometric shape that has no edges, no periphery? Somebody's got to be out there on the margin.

The complaint, which readily morphs into reproach and accusation, comes from those who have been marginalized — blacks, gays, aboriginal communities, women, handicapped people, the poor, single mothers, freethinkers, and "dissidents whose ideas and views run against those of the mainstream" (Wikipedia) — or from those who are sticking up for them.

Whatever the complaint, though, there is clearly a need in the U.S. for alert complainers. When a person or group is excluded from meaningful participation in any democratic society those running it — the electorate, eventually — need to be told, or jabbed.

But we also need to be alert to the way our complaining words work. Some take us right to the mark and some take us off into space. By now this one has us wandering beyond Pluto. There are the neo-Nazis over there. Do we want them at the center? Certainly not. To us they're asteroids and they might as well know it. To hell with their feelings.  So, we're marginalizers.  What we've done earns us the name because it exactly fits what stupid people do to blacks, gays, women, and so on.

We put people in that fix when we adopt a complaint-word without respect for its reference, to which the root may still be attached. When the root, like this one, gives you an impossible job of picturing, you are going to question yourself into spasms. "Remote from power and economic centers, mountain communities are often marginalized." Remote places are on the geographical margin. Were they out there and then marginalized? By whom? Could you marginalize yourself by moving out there? Nah, people don't marginalize themselves. Not a single example in the Wikipedia entry shows human agency or responsibility. They are all victims there, acted upon by the center, and that's the way it's been since sociologists introduced the term.

Follow that with this, another sociologist's example of marginalization: "Aboriginal communities lost their culture and values through forced assimilation and lost their rights in society" (Wikipedia). Assimilation into? They were marginalized by being moved toward the center. We're in geometrical and logical trouble, whatever the sociology of it.

Apparently, though, many minds can handle this and "marginalize" has gained popularity as its application has become more general. By now the meaning "to belittle, depreciate, discount, or dismiss" has, according to the OED, become "the only meaning of the word that is used." That pretty well takes the complaint onto the basketball court. The dominant social group is dissing the others. The others come back by calling them "bullies," which, according to the OED, is what the accusation in "marginalize" now amounts to. It's wound up as a zinger in highbrow trash-talk.