Thread by @altadenakatie

🚨 ALERT! Someone wrote a very competent piece of analysis and did not unpack a VERY PARTICULAR NUANCE that I find interesting...ON THE INTERNET! Get in losers, we're doing Latin - a 🧵

https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1446999545645256709

Okay! So in this piece, @noUpside - technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, and who investigates how narratives disperse across Al Gore's Internet - writes about how the structure of the internet lends itself to propaganda, yes, but also to something else 1/*

She says, yes, there's propaganda and there's also the noise and misinformation and general agita that all of us spread all the time, amplifying various dumb things - what if we called that "ampliganda"? 2/*

So a FEW THINGS 3/*

First, and most importantly, you cannot try to make a new buzzword without running the risk of this 4/*

Secondly, there is a whole AWESOME LATIN piece of this that actually ties directly to @noUpside's central thesis, and I am sufficiently exercised about it on a Sunday morning to be here on Twitter dot com doing the Lord's work 5/*

So if you read the whole piece, there's a bit of spicy Reformation-era drama, about how Pope Gregory XV was super worried about losing out to Protestant missionaries in parts of the globe he/the Church was trying very hard to colonize (true) 6/*

Which is why in 1622 he set up the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, of which the article says "The word propaganda is a form of a Latin verb, one that Gregory likely chose “to add to the sense of a religious Crusade” (also very true!) 7/*

But besties, WHY? Why would "propaganda" make Gregory's new outfit feel extra Crusades-y? 8/*

I'm going to tell you. 9/*

So Gregory XV, before he became Pope, was a Jesuit theologian named Alessandro Ludovisi - he spent most of his career as basically a canon lawyer, and he was a nice guy who was consistently not in the best of health 10/*

Fun fact about Gregory XV: only pope for 3 years (1621-1623), and because he was in bad shape, he knew he would need someone much more on their game to help him run the show in Rome, so he called in his nephew (#nepotism, can't have a Renaissance pope without it!) Ludovico 11/*

Ludovico Ludovisi was *definitely* feeling perky - so perky that he was out commissioning a boatload of very expenisve Renaissance art from Bernini and pals, including building a massive 90-acre villa and garden complex with beaucoup frescoes called the Villa Ludovisi 12/*

Visiting the Villa Ludovisi was a must-see stop on the Grand Tour a century and a bit later, because it was absolutely STUFFED with antiquities (Goethe was very into this when he went, and bought a copy of a giant head of Juno, very cool) 13/*

ANYWAY. Back to Gregory. So he was a very sophisticated dude, and knew his Latin extremely well. So his name for the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (usually just called "Propaganda Fide" for short) was a deliberate choice. 14/*

"Propaganda," as the author of the article points out, is a Latin verb form - it's called the gerundive, and it's a verbal adjective WHAT DOES THAT MEAN 15/*

It means that it adds some action to a description - so in this case, not just "Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith" but rather "Sacred Congregation for the Faith that MUST BE Spread" 16/*

This is called the "gerundive of obligation" in Latin, and it basically adds a vibe of "HAS TO be done" when used 17/*

The most famous usage of this construction is Cato the Elder's "Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be destroyed!) from the Third Punic War in the 140s BC - actually an abbreviation of his longer exhortation, but it's the one that's stuck because it's snappier 18/*

In medieval Latin, you see the gerundive all over the place - "habendum et tenendum" appearns often in medieval contracts, meaning "to have and to hold"...whence the language in the marriage vows we still use, definitely a gerundive flex 19/*

It's in "memorandum" (that which must be remembered), "legend" (from legenda, that which must be read), the name "Amanda" (she who must be loved), and even "dividend" (that which must be divided/distributed), all carrying that sense of obligation deep in their linguistic DNA 20/*

So by using "propaganda", Gregory was consciously adding a sense of obligation - an idea that this HAD TO HAPPEN, that it was critical, and even echoing the Classical sense that this was a mighty struggle against the forces of chaos, and degradation (sorry, Carthage) 21/*

THAT'S why it feels like a Crusade, because - Deus lo volt! - it is divinely obligated and required. Such is the power of the gerundive! 22/*

It's ALSO why I think that instead of "ampliganda" - truly on par with the Ice Capades in word formation, there is no such thing as a "Capade," what even is a capade, it's a bastardization of "escapade" 23/*

...ahem, got distracted... I would suggest the correctly formed gerundive AMPLIFICANDA (from "amplificare") 24/*

Cool for several reasons! One, it's fun to say (critical), and TWO, it speaks directly to the phenomenon that @noUpside is investigating in her piece - the sense that someone, one *has* to retweet or repost or spread this information, a persistent sense of obligation 25/*

In a sense, the whole damn internet is one big gerundive, optimized to get people to feel obligated to do things - indeed, even the hashtag that @noUpside tracks, #PelosiMustGo, is itself a gerundive construction. Carthage must be destroyed! Pelosi Must Go! 26/*

And certainly there are tremendous parallels with the sense of holy war or righteous struggle, plus the implication of violence, captured in the consistent co-opting of the language of crusade by the alt-right (a phenomenon much better unpacked by @tlecaque than myself) 27/*

So for all these reasons, I see a direct comparison between the sense of obligation inherent Gregory's use of "Propaganda" and the sense of obligation that has been baked in to the narrative process of online engagement 28/*

That sense of obligation is there, not just in the language we use, but in the exhortation to others to join us, to be part of the struggle and to spread the word - THAT'S amplificanda for you. 30/