Journal of Economic Iatrogenesis & Labor Studies
Words We Lost
vs. Words We
Never Had
Why English Doesn't Have Ubuntu
Why English Doesn't Have Ubuntu
Marc McAleavey, MSW
Joy Repair
Research Findings
What 600 Words Reveal
About a Culture
χ²= 181.71
p < .001
The odds this is a coincidence? Less than 1 in 1,000. This pattern is real.
A chi-square test across 600 lexical items shows the relationship between what English lost and what it never had is statistically massive.
Cramer's V = 0.55
Large Effect Size
Not a small signal buried in noise. This is the kind of number that rewrites how you see the problem.
A Cramer's V of 0.55 indicates a strong, structural association — the kind that changes how you read the problem.
Words We Lost
Environment · Body · Time
English shed the language of land, sensation, and structural roles. The physical world went quiet.
Dead English words cluster in physical and structural domains. We shed the language of land, sensation, and institutional roles.
Words We Never Had
Relationship · Emotion · Identity
The concepts English never built cluster in relational and emotional life. Not lost — never built. The culture was never designed to hold them.
The concepts English never developed cluster in relational and emotional life. Not lost — never built. The culture was never designed to hold them.
From the Paper
"If a system cannot name a problem, it cannot solve it."
Language that once existed in public and institutional discourse — terms for collective care, civic belonging, and structural accountability — that have been eroded, privatized, or made unspeakable.
Commons
Shared public resource. Now largely confined to legal or academic contexts.
Solidarity
Collective action rooted in shared condition. Replaced by "awareness."
Repair
Structural restoration. Displaced by "resilience" — which puts the burden back on the individual.
Accountability
Institutional consequence. Hollowed into PR-facing language.
Mutual Aid
Community interdependence. Rediscovered in crisis, forgotten after.
Redress
Remedy for historical harm. Almost entirely absent from institutional vocabulary.
Language loss is not neutral. When words disappear from public discourse, the realities they described become harder to name — and harder to repair.
Timeline
A History of Language Loss
Language loss is not random. It follows power. Each era below marks a moment when institutional forces made certain words unspeakable — or simply unnecessary.
"Commons"
The concept of shared public resources was systematically privatized as industrial capitalism expanded. Land, water, and public space shifted from collective stewardship to private ownership.
"Solidarity" & "Collective"
The Espionage and Sedition Acts criminalized dissent. Solidarity — rooted in shared labor conditions — became politically dangerous. "Collective" was recast as foreign and subversive.
"Mutual Aid"
As the federal government absorbed welfare functions, the grassroots mutual aid networks that communities had built — especially Black and immigrant communities — were displaced. The word followed the practice into obscurity.
"Redistribution" & "Redress"
Any language of structural remedy was reframed as communist sympathy. Redress for historical harm became unspeakable in mainstream political discourse.
"Accountability" & "Repair"
Corporate PR absorbed accountability language and hollowed it out. "Repair" was replaced by "resilience" — a word that places the burden of recovery on the people who were harmed.
"Truth" & "Public"
Digital platforms commodified attention and fragmented shared reality. "Public" became a market segment. "Truth" became a partisan claim. The infrastructure for collective sense-making collapsed.
Comparison Matrix
Side by Side
Each row maps a theme to a word we once had — and the concept we never named. Together they reveal the shape of what's missing.
Collective Care
Commons
Shared resource. Once civic infrastructure. Now a legal term.
Belonging Infrastructure
The systems that communicate who a society expects to belong.
Structural Harm
Redress
Remedy for institutional harm. Almost entirely absent from public language.
Temporal Injustice
Harm that operates across time — neither past nor present, but both simultaneously.
Accountability
Accountability
Institutional consequence. Hollowed into PR-facing corporate language.
Institutional Shame
The shame a system produces and then projects onto the people it harms.
Community Power
Solidarity
Collective action rooted in shared condition. Replaced by "awareness."
Anticipatory Justice
Decision-making oriented toward the futures our choices generate.
Narrative
Truth
A shared reality. Fragmented by platforms and partisan capture.
Narrative Dispossession
The systemic removal of a community's ability to tell its own story.
Healing
Repair
Structural restoration. Displaced by "resilience" — which puts burden on the individual.
Intergenerational Harm
We have the concept but no single word — forcing us to explain rather than name.