Words, as any other tool, hold no power by themselves. You need someone to sift through them and arrange them in the proper sequence in order for them to hold any meaning at all; and you need someones to read said sequence and decipher it. In other words, words hold at most a potential power of changing something in people upon their decipherment. When employed correctly, the fractal structure of language allows words to change not merely individuals, but entire populations -- as clearly shown by historical evidence of texts, speeches and so on and so forth, from philosophy to mere propaganda, the edifice of human civilization is built, among others, upon words.
So let's admit for a moment that words, when uttered a certained way, hold power. There's absolutely nothing special about this phenomenon, it's just that human language provides a basis for human societies, in very much the same way bird language provides a basis for bird societies. Humans, however, are very special through that recursive-meta-thinking of theirs, and thus they've come to the idea that language itself (and thus society) can be engineered, or otherwise moulded in some form that fits some purpose, desire or dream. This very idea poses two fundamental problems: the first, the question of whether this engineering is possible at all, and to which extent; and the second, the ethical question of whether doing this is "the right thing", for certain values of "the", "right" and "thing".
The answer to the first question is obviously yes. That recursive-meta-thinking is amplified by language, so words can be used to change how humans perceive them, which is how the fine art of nurturing humans came to be a thing. Thus from this point of view, imbuing individuals with the power to correctly wield the tools of language is not only possible, it is absolutely necessary for the continued existence of humanity.
As to extents, shoulds and musts and rights and wrongs, recent experiments have shown that the same methods used to educate people can be directed so as to systematically change humans' relationship to language. In this new universe, words run in a continuous flux, both their value and their meaning changing for some purpose or another. In practice, this approach is possible on one hand merely until some self-proclaimed authority decides to tyrannise over them, birthing a world of politically-spherical chicken; and on the other, only insofar as the potential victims are receptive to this new universe. The latter problem in particular explains why all propaganda is necessarily catering to victims' aestheticalreligious preferences.
The fundamental problem with this so-called "tyranny", however, is that it's self-defeating. While education is supposed to give human individuals the tools to take over their own lives, the overengineering of language reduces said individuals to slaves, to soft, amorphous jellies -- soft, docile, but stupid indeed, fortunately capable of breathing, eating and shitting, but unfortunately incapable of anything else. Moreover, and counterintuitively enough, this abuse of symbols of power degrades the symbols themselves, thereby ensuring that, on the long term, the symbols actually become devoid of any actual substance.
On a more personal note: please read this before asking me why I don't agree with language-policing committees, with FCCs and CNAs, with arresting stupid youngsters over their opinion on fucking young women, with making a fuss over the impact on "national security" of publishing classified documents, or in general with anything that presupposes the rape of language, i.e. of thinking. And just because I don't agree with you, that doesn't mean that I should, since this was the whole fucking point of this exercise in the first place.
> Words, as any other tool,
The problem with this interpretation is that words aren't simply tools. The word-as-a-tool may indeed yield useful things such as computer languages, but that's just about their whole utility, or toolness, if you will.
Words form the basis of a medium for conveying signals. Generally they are indeed used in a certain sense, but certainly not in the same sense tools are used. In what sense -- well, that's an interesting question, the essence of this matter lying in the fact that language, while certainly representable in geometric terms, is quite definitely not simple geometry, regardless of what the naïve may believe. You don't "learn" language through representation, you learn it through association, which is what all learning is at its core. And why, say, even domestic animals can learn to react a certain way to certain words.
As for the subject matter of this article: it's been quite a long while since the greater ones in the hierarchy observed that, quite perversely indeed, they can influence the actions of lesser individuals by uttering certain words in a certain way. This technique has been perfected to the level of science in the twentieth century, which indeed turns language into a certain sort of tool -- not in any way by "lowering language" itself, as language is what always has been; but by lowering said individuals to the level of tools (see Heidegger for details).
[...] will begin with a quote from an older article of [...]
[...] and also leaving aside the (not entirely unfounded) premise of the fictitious character of the "engineered language"; the first thought that pops into my mind is: why even bother attempting to stop this general [...]