What Is a Hater?

The corruption of language.

What Is a Hater?

When I grew up, we used the word “hater” to describe someone who hates. Seems obvious, right?

But now the meaning has evolved. At first, it seemed to mean someone who was angry at someone. I’m often angry at people; I rarely hate those same people.

Now it seems to have evolved further to mean someone who is critical of someone or even critical of just the person’s ideas or actions. I saw an instance of this in an X by Utah Senator Mike Lee recently. He wrote:

What will Trump’s haters do if his tariff play brings country after country to the negotiating table, resulting in bilateral trade agreements that make U.S. trade more free than ever?

Maybe Lee was referring to Trump’s actual haters, of whom there are millions. Who knows what they would do? They would probably keep hating.

Somehow, though, I have the uncomfortable feeling that Senator Lee would include me among the haters, simply because I’m strongly critical of Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs. By the way, if Trump’s policies worked the way Lee’s conditional states, I would be happy. I would still be upset that Trump violated treaties to impose those tariffs. Not only the ends, but also the means to those ends, matter. But I would still be happy with the outcome, assuming that Trump didn’t change his mind later. (Remember what he did after renegotiating NAFTA and getting USMCA. Although he thought he had achieved “a colossal victory,” he has now abrogated the treaty.)

Back to the hater point.

This misuse of language is bipartisan. Left-wing University of California, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong often used the term “hater” to refer to critics. (I stopped reading him some months ago, but I assume he still uses the term.)

Language matters. The late Thomas Szasz stated, “In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”

Whoever does the defining, it’s important to get the definitions right.

George Orwell pointed out that language affects thinking. If you keep calling a critic a “hater,” at some point you may think, without any justification, that he hates you.