The Difficulty With Words.

Every few years someone decides that words have become too dangerous to be left alone. It is an old ambition. Shakespeare knew better than to trust it. Lewis Carroll laughed at it outright. Kafka watched it happen slowly enough that nobody noticed until it was finished. Queensland has now joined the argument.

In March, the state government made it a criminal offence to use two particular phrases in public, if the use of them makes someone feel menaced, harassed or offended. The phrases are "from the river to the sea" and "globalise the intifada." I will name them once, for the record, and then not again. Both have been chanted at pro-Palestinian rallies for years. Both now carry the distinction, rare for a slogan, of appearing by name inside the Criminal Code. Seven plaintiffs have taken the law to the High Court, arguing that Queensland has stepped outside the narrow freedom the Constitution allows Parliament to leave untouched: the freedom to argue about politics at all. The government maintains the ban exists to protect Jewish Queenslanders from language it regards as a promise of violence rather than a metaphor about geography. A hearing date has not yet been set.

The legal question is genuinely a legal question, and the judges will spend their considerable talents on it. I find myself circling something underneath it. Who, exactly, owns the meaning of a word? Not its spelling. Dictionaries manage that well enough. Its meaning. The speaker intends one thing. The listener hears another. A historian recognises a century of accumulated weight. A government hears a threat it has decided to name and prohibit specifically, rather than describe generally. Words have always carried more luggage than grammar can comfortably hold, and every attempt to travel light with them eventually fails.

Lewis Carroll saw the problem before any legislature did. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty announces, "it means just what I choose it to mean." Alice, sensibly, wants to know whether he can really do that. Humpty corrects her gently. The real question, he says, is which is to be master. That exchange has outlived its nursery long ago, because it was never about grammar. It has always been about who gets to decide, and Queensland has just supplied the latest entrant to that very old contest.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a quieter answer than Humpty Dumpty's. The meaning of a word, he thought, is found in its use. Not handed down from above. Collected, over time, in kitchens and classrooms and football grounds and funerals, the way an old house collects dust. Sometimes a phrase becomes affectionate through use. Sometimes it becomes poisonous. Occasionally, uncomfortably, both at once, depending on who is standing where. That is precisely what makes a phrase so resistant to legislation, and precisely what a law drafted with a fixed meaning in mind is obliged to ignore.

Kafka would have understood the mechanism better than either of them. He knew that uncertainty rarely needs to punish anyone to be effective. Most people have no wish to discover the outer edge of a criminal statute through personal experience. Long before a magistrate becomes necessary, they simply stop talking. Not because their views have changed. Because they can no longer be certain where the line has been drawn, and certainty was never really the government's promise to keep.

One case makes the difficulty unusually visible. Among those charged under the new law is a Jewish-Australian man, arrested for wearing a T-shirt printed with one of the two prohibited phrases. The law was written to protect people like him from language treated as inherently threatening. He is currently a defendant for having worn it. Nobody designed that outcome. It simply arrived, the way outcomes do when a law tries to fix a single meaning onto a sentence that was never going to hold still for the purpose.

None of this pretends that words cannot wound, or that intimidation deserves indulgence because it arrives dressed as politics. It can, and it doesn't. The harder question, the one the T-shirt exposes rather than argues, is where offence ends and menace begins, and where menace becomes something the law can reasonably call harm. Queensland's Parliament has answered that question for two sentences only, which is a curiously narrow place to plant a flag on something so wide.

The High Court will eventually decide whether the law fits within the Constitution. It will not decide what the two phrases mean next year, or in twenty years, or to whoever inherits them next. That question has never belonged to judges. It belongs to everyone who keeps using the words, arguing about them, and quietly changing what they carry.

You will notice, if you go back and check, that you have now read an entire essay about two phrases without seeing either of them a second time. I'd like to say that was your choice...