Words matter. I'm reminded of this almost daily by a framed Nathaniel Hawthorne quote in my office that I received as a gift some years ago, which reads: "Words--so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

Definitions of words matter as well. Willfully applying the wrong word can deliver deception and falsehood as potently as an outright lie.

When Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. popularized the phrase "falsely shouting fire in a theater" in a free-speech decision, he was explicitly describing situations where words could be abused to bring about "substantive evils."

A modern expansion of Holmes' metaphor today would be to view America as a grand theater, and the shouting of "authoritarianism" as the false fire cry.

At a time when defining the word "woman" functions as a gotcha question, it's not surprising that the meaning of authoritarianism might not be universally understood.

A good starting point is the dictionary. According to the massive unabridged edition I keep on my desk, authoritarianism is "the principle of obedience to authority as opposed to individual liberty."

Dictionary.com echoes that definition, and adds a secondary one: "a government or political system, principle, or practice in which individual freedom is held as........

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