It’s customary to remember the personalities the country lost during the year. But what about the words? C.S. Lewis coined the word ‘verbicide’ to describe what happens to those words whose usefulness is killed off when their precise meaning is mutilated. Such words deserve remembrance, too.

No Maltese words will be covered here, even though several deserve a proper obituary. Other words, like ‘Mafia’ and ‘fascist’ have received multiple wounds but are still just about serviceable.

However, the following three words (or, in one case, term) have inarguably been killed off by propaganda and misuse. Should they appear alive to you, it’s because the embalming by spin-doctors has been so artful.

First, there is ‘authority’. One classic definition states that authority is the preserve of someone whose power is recognised as legitimate. You don’t obey them because they have the power to smack you down; you obey because you believe it is right to do so.

Yet, is there a secular power left in this country whose authority has survived this year intact? Of whom we can say that their office commands authority, without twisting the word or grimacing as we utter it?

The President of the Republic is being sued for her alleged responsibility for an appalling incident that saw several people gravely injured. Some of the people suing her say she has been less than forthright about her involvement in the decisions leading up to that incident.

It is of course the courts that will decide the legal merits of the case. But authority is a social concept, not a legal one.

If the social authority of the President is damaged, that of the Police Commissioner is in tatters.

The chairman of our financial intelligence agency continues to insult our personal intelligence by behaving as though he has no access to the agency’s reports, filed with the police, about serious suspicions of money laundering by members of, or close to, the government.

This, despite the fact that the reports are now leaked and available online.

Authority in the military has been destroyed by a general election spree that saw half the army promoted. The authority of rank has been substituted by the naked power of political patronage.

Meanwhile, according to surveys by Transparency International and the World Economic Forum, 2017 saw trust in the judiciary and civil service slide down, and perception of corruption climb up.

A second word that died was ‘establishment’. Properly speaking, the term refers to a group that dominates an organisation or country on a near-permanent basis. In Malta, it has been made to refer to people with, at best, a provisional grip on power.

The fact is that neither major political party has an ‘establishment’ in the American sense of the term.

No Maltese party leader over the last 40 years has been an establishment figure prior to becoming leader. In most cases, only the accidents of circumstance explain the career. In each case, outsider status (understood one way or another) was an intrinsic selling point.

What our political parties do have are apparatchiks, long-standing party functionaries. What is striking in the current two leaders, Joseph Muscat and Adrian Delia, is that while their respective machines rail against the ‘establishment’, both owe much to apparatchiks.

Muscat was one himself for a long time. Delia’s close collaborators include two long-serving, full-time PN functionaries and others who were at one point or another functionaries in the media arm of the party.

When apparatchiks rail against the establishment, one of the things they’re doing is disguising their consolidation of personal power over a machine by saying they’re doing it in the name of the masses against a repressive elite.

But another thing they’re doing is diverting attention from the real establishment: the powerful commercial interests on whose largesse their political success depends.

These are the three terms – authority, establishment, and hate speech – I am mourning at this end of the year

Meanwhile, the members of the real establishment continue to jostle for power between themselves, with the best connected of the day consolidating the grip on strategic sectors, like real estate and energy, with changes in the market rules designed to benefit them.

Finally, let’s have a minute of silence for ‘hate speech’. Some of you might be surprised it was still alive this year. Hadn’t the term been abused to death the year before – usually when accusing Daphne Caruana Galizia for her blog?

Severely abused, yes. But by my reckoning it was still breathing until Tony Zarb was falsely accused of hate speech late this year.

After the assassination of Caruana Galizia, a group of women formed Occupy Justice and camped outside the Office of the Prime Minister. Zarb dismissed them as whores.

He was accused of hate speech – both by his usual adversaries as well as the trade union he once led. No lesser figures than the President and the Justice minister let it be understood that they, too, considered what Zarb had said as hate speech.

There’s no doubt that what Zarb said qualified him as a vulgar, sexist boor, and any serious government would have terminated his services as consultant immediately. But vulgar sexism isn’t hate speech.

Hate speech is a legal term that refers to inciting hatred against entire, legally specified groups of people. Calling some women whores doesn’t constitute inciting hatred against all women.

Likewise, nothing Caruana Galizia ever wrote qualifies as hate speech. Harsh invective and contempt, perhaps. But it’s significant that no one accusing her of hate speech, including ministers and government spokesmen, ever instituted a court case against her for breaking the hate speech law.

Indeed, the assessment of Giovanni Bonello, former judge at the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, is that Caruana Galizia would have won every libel case ever instituted against her (even the ones she lost in Malta) had she kept on fighting them all the way to Strasbourg.

(Bonello gives this assessment in the book Invicta, the just published festschrift dedicated to the memory of Caruana Galizia. Health warning: I contributed to it, too.)

The overarching point is this. When you have government ministers and the President referring to public statements as ‘hate speech’, only two consequences can follow.

Either legal action follows because real hate speech breaks the law. Or there is no such legal action, in which case either the law is being broken with impunity or else the ministers and the President were abusing a term enough to render it meaningless.

In these cases, there was no basis for legal action. The term ‘hate speech’ was abused by the servants of the State. How can it survive?

These are the three terms – authority, establishment, and hate speech – I am mourning at this end of the year. Between them, they cover the legitimacy of our institutions, an important group of people we should really hold to account, and freedom of our speech.

Legitimacy, accountability and free speech are all weaker with these words now dead.

To those of you who think that there are other words I should have remembered – like ‘unity’, ‘planning’, and ‘negative’ – I can only say: so many funerals, so little time.

ranierfsadni@europe.com