Don't Put Words In My Mouth
Satirical fiction about what could happen if our words begin to disappear
Dear Readers,
Please don’t hate me.
I didn’t mean for things to turn out this way. It all started so innocently. After years of struggling in obscurity as an aspiring writer, it happened.
The Offer (I Couldn’t Refuse)
The email popped up in my inbox on a Monday morning, with a subject I could not ignore. “Your government needs writers—and we guarantee publication!”
At first, I thought it was a hoax, but as I read the message, I got excited. They offered to hire travel writers, like me, who speak other languages, and know what is going on in the world, to identify the newest words in the English language.
As a bonus, they’d pay us for pieces and publish them on a prestigious website. I filled out the application. Soon, I was hired.
I began submitting new words from other languages. Forget hygge, and familiar foods and drinks like acai, matcha, poke, bibimbap, and bulgogi.
Those foreign words are old school.
We’re talking about stuff that blew up globally in just the last five years, like aguachile, miso coffee, chimichurri, leche de tigre, michelada, and bingsu.
Once a week, they published my travel posts. I received generous compensation. I was not the only one. A lot of other struggling travel writers had signed on, too.
Just Doing My Job
Suddenly, my life turned around. I had money and could afford nice things, like food. I paid my bills on time. The calls and emails from creditors stopped.
My fellow writers and I created a chat group. One day, someone posted an alarming note.
“Hey, did you notice the government just banned the new words we submitted?”
I went to the website. Our words were indeed banned. The website said these foreign words had entered the country illegally.
Now, the government was detaining words as well as immigrants.
The announcement came from an agency named VICE.
The acronym stood for Vocabulary Infiltration Control and Expulsion. Its purpose was to detain and deport words that had snuck into English.
The words we submitted were held captive by word haters who ruthlessly detained new words we had found online and in print.
We had been duped; we were complicit. What if people found out? What a fool I was. I had been so desperate to get published.
Too late, I realized my mistake.
The Word Czar
Who was doing this?
Ironically, the President appointed a word czar to find words that had snuck into English.
Frantic, we contacted our agency, which said it had no idea this would happen. The Office of the Czar informed us that we were implicated in the initiative.
“But,” we protested, “We love words from other countries. You can’t do this to us.”
“Oh,” they replied. “We can. We already have. By the way, you are co-conspirators. Don’t even think about trying to back out. Or snitch.”
Oh my God. Never could I have imagined falling into such a trap. Not only would we lose our income if we quit, but they’d also label us as secret operatives.
We’d never be able to write again—who would read our work?
Our careers were dead.
Our crime: dismantling the very language that was our medium. We did not detain words; we had handed them over to VICE, which used AI to redact them.
As fast as foreign words appeared online, AI scrubbed them off websites and social media.
“Many of the new foreign words,” the Czar cautioned Americans, “are smuggled into the country in foods and beverages from places like Mexico and Asia.”
He enlisted the help of concerned Americans to identify and report illegal words.
“Help us find words like taco, nacho, and burrito, words that do not have the decency to end with a consonant.”
“Most O words have to go. A few O words like Hello can stay. Also allowed to stay are words our leader likes, such as photo and video, especially of him, and radio.”
The people understood. “Our leader likes to hear his beautiful voice on the radio!”
Soon, strange-sounding fruits and vegetables began to disappear from vegetable aisles at the grocery stores. No jicama, no kiwi. No name, no sale.
Old friends began avoiding me. My writing group suspended me.
Meanwhile, the madness marched ahead.
“Our leader agreed to allow some foods ending with the vowel A to remain, such as banana. He likes saying, “ba-na-na!” He also loves quesadillas and pizza.”
Members of the media said, “We’re nervous because we end in A.”
“Relax,” the Czar said. “The media will be allowed to remain. He loves and hates you guys. But he enjoys insulting you on the air and watching you squirm.”
The purge proceeded to the remaining vowels— I, U. Spaghetti and ravioli survived; sushi and zucchini did not.
“Tofu is out,” the Czar said. No surprise there.
I had been the one assigned to find words ending with U; fortunately, there weren’t very many. Still, I felt like I was killing English one word at a time.
Each word we lost drove a spike into my heart.
Once, I had celebrated new words. Now, the word party was over.
We thought it would end with the foreign vowel words. We were wrong.
***
(Months passed. My fellow travel writers and I had begun drinking heavily.)
I felt a deep sense of shame.
I did not go out much. Local coffee shops told me not to return. Customers had complained. The real-world implications became clearer to me as time passed.
I wrote a letter to the editor. “Words,” I said, “are the building blocks not only of our language but of our day-to-day reality. Take away words, and reality crumbles.
It was inevitable.
American Restaurant Industry Collapses
“Today,” the Czar announced at a press conference, “I regret to inform you that much of the American restaurant industry has collapsed.”
We knew why. Menus were heavily redacted. Items blacked out. People didn’t know what to order. Chefs did not know what to cook.
Within a year, the Czar ran out of foreign-sounding words to deport. He no longer needed our help. We got pink slips in the mail.
In a way, it was a relief.
For the next phase, they hired struggling English professors who had never gotten tenure. The next goal was to strip English of words of foreign origin that were already over a thousand years old.
It was word cannibalism! The expression “eat my own words” became prophecy.
“The end of days is upon us,” I muttered.
Stormin’ Norman
“Today, I have some exciting news to share,” the Czar said into the microphone.
“We have broadened the scope of VICE to target other words our leader dislikes, words which the fake news often claims he has difficulty pronouncing.”
“Like what?” a reporter shouted.
“Think acetaminophen.”
A few reporters giggled. Their smiles vanished when the Czar said. “Centuries ago, a French guy named Norman invaded the English language.”
The reporters shook their heads. “A French guy named Norman?”
“Go ahead. Laugh,” the Czar snarled. “You eggheads call it the Norman conquest. We call it a big mistake. All the Norman words have to go.”
“That’s going to be a lot of words,” a reporter said. “Which ones are top priority?”
“Bothersome words ending with a hard Y sound, like verify or testify.”
One reporter asked, “Why those particular words?”
Another reporter made a loud sneezing sound, “Epstein!” The Czar glared at him.
A reporter asked, “Will any words introduced by Norman be allowed to stay?”
The Czar said, “He likes the words falsify and deify. Especially ‘deify.’ “
“Jesus!” a reporter muttered.
“That’s ‘Doctor Jesus to you!’” the Czar admonished.
In the months that followed, at press conferences, astonished reporters mumbled to each other. “What words will they target this week?”
Court, judge, and jury fell; crime and enemy remained.
“We know who our enemies are,” the Czar stated, staring at the press corps.
He continued, “We do not like immigrant or alien. We like arrest and deport.”
Like us, the professors had been used; they lost their integrity. Students boycotted their classes; other professors avoided them in the faculty lounge.
The fear spread. The effects were pervasive. The evidence was everywhere. One day, as I walked through a park, a familiar song drifted through the air.
It was an old Sam Cooke tune. I noticed that some words had been redacted. “Don’t know much about his-bleep, Don’t know much about geo-bleep. All I know is that I love you. And if you loved me, too, what a won-bleep world it could be.”
I looked around. People tried to mouth the lyrics, but they had forgotten them.
***
The professors had been fired. We had become booze buddies, hanging out near discount liquor stores, panhandling. We met in the alleys, sharing bottles and misery.
Now, language itself was the enemy.
The Sheriff and the Posse (Months more passed; the purge continued)
The press corps looked scruffy and unshaven.
Outside, in the streets, there was chaos. As words disappeared, reality had changed, too.
The courts had closed, and the jails had been opened. An official announced, “Without words, there can be no sentences. All prisoners are now free to go.”
One day, the Czar was absent. A new guy had the microphone.
‘Who are you, and where is the Czar?” the reporters asked.
“FYI, the title Czar has been eliminated,” the new man said. “The president has replaced the czar with a sheriff, namely me.”
The Sheriff was a former car mechanic and preacher from down South. He drawled into the microphone.
“Having cleansed, I say cleansed, our language of thousands of troublesome furrin’ words, the new goal of VICE is to rid our language of prideful, harmful words.”
The press corps looked confused. “What does that mean, please?”
“From now on,” he said. “We expect Americans to use pure, simple English words.”
A reporter asked, “Like what?”
“Words like man, woman, wife, mother, father, brother, sister. Family. Home. Work.”
“Are you serious?” one of the reporters exclaimed.
The Sheriff said, “Boys, listen, if you can’t say words, you can’t play with words.”
He gave an order. Federal agents marched in and arrested the reporters. The Sheriff crowed into the mic, “Folks, those troublemakers are gone for good!”
“There will be no newspapers, no reporters, no anchor men yakking on the TV news. From now on, your guv’ment will speak directly to y’all, in its own words.”
The purge continued. A smattering of words remained. America had lost its voice.
As people stared sullenly at the large screens the government had installed in the cities and towns, the jowly face of the Sheriff appeared.
They heard the familiar drawl.
“To prevent bad words from sneakin’ in, y’all must now stay home, leave yard only for work, take road when sun is in skah. No go out when you see moon and starhs.”
Silence fell over the crowds. There were few words left to speak. Few thoughts left to think.
I had gone mad. I loped through the crowd like a lunatic, disheveled, unwashed.
“Hide your words,” I shouted to people. “Say them in secret! Try to remember!”
Parents stared at me and hustled their kids past. “Don’t listen to that man, children.”
The broadcast continued.
“Keep yore eyes open and yore mouth shuht,” the Sheriff said. “Hold ya nose if you no like it, or we gonna break yo’ bones. Work and go and come when we say.”
The crowds cowered. Off camera, they glowered.
“Follow orders. Or else.” The screens went dark, as did the minds of the people.
***
One day, all the coffee shops closed their doors. A sign said, “No tea, no coffee. Go home.“
People drove to the grocery stores to look for tea and coffee. Signs on the shelves read, “No tea or coffee until further notice.”
That night, the Sheriff announced that coffee and tea had been banned.
“Dirty foreign drinks!” he called them. “Agitating the people! Riling ‘em up.”
“Everybody, calm down, now,” he said. “Wake up natural in the morning.”
***
Morning came. No screaming. No rioting. No response. Nothing.
The leader asked if it had worked as planned.
“Perfect, sir. No energy. No motivation.”
The long sleep had begun.
AFTERWORD
I won’t say much. You get the point.
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” people used to say, back when we had words.
What if instead of putting words in our mouths, the government took our words?
Could this really happen? Over my dead body. Don’t take words out of my mouth!
Is this story too far-fetched to ever happen? You think not?
Are you sure?
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Eres tan gracioso!
Very creative and clever!