Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Names make news, an old newsroom motto has it. But names also make opinions. What something gets called can have more spin on it than a Mariano Rivera cutter, whether the person doing the calling intends it that way or not. Sometimes the difference between positive and negative is a matter of taste, literally or figuratively. (My sweet might be your treacly. Or your cloying.) Sometimes the difference is a product of circumstances, as when yesterday’s beachfront property becomes today’s flood zone. Sometimes it gets all judgmental. After a couple of Martinis one may regard oneself as pleasantly pixillated, but one’s spouse may consider one drunk as a skunk.

In politics, the naming is almost always with malice (or niceness) aforethought. Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, the Occupied Territories, Occupied Palestine: all denote the same geographical reality, but on a sliding (or ascending, take your pick) moral scale. Call it what you will—enhanced interrogation or torture, collateral damage or civilian deaths, pro-life or anti-reproductive rights, global warming or climate change, homosexual marriage or marriage equality, assault rifles or “semi-automatic small-calibre sporting rifles with plastic accessories”—it’s all the same, and (excepting torture and warming) it’s all, to some degree, propaganda.

When it comes to Washington’s current (and to all appearances permanent) fiscal fracas, the semantic weeds are as high as an elephant’s eye and higher than a donkey’s. In the battles over debt limits, fiscal cliffs, continuing resolutions, and the budget, the clashing sides deploy duelling vocabularies. The Democrats’ revenue enhancements, public investments, and “the one per cent” are the Republicans’ tax hikes, reckless government spending, and “the job creators.” Reading from left to right, the inheritance tax is the estate tax is the death tax. The Dems prevail in a few of these skirmishes, the Reps in a few more. Most are stalemated. But in one of them the conservative side long ago won a decisive victory, a victory at once famous and infamous: “entitlements.”

The word, that is, not the thing. “Entitlements”—alternatively, “entitlement programs”—is now the standard descriptor for what ought to be called, more accurately and less tendentiously, social insurance. In the early days of Social Security, politicians and bureaucrats occasionally talked of it as an “earned entitlement.” The term then dropped out of sight for decades. It reappeared, minus the “earned,” in the mid-nineteen-seventies, bubbling up in the works of a pair of prominent conservative academics, Robert Nisbet and Robert Nozick.

To Nisbet, its usage was still novel enough to warrant quotation marks. Writing in Encounter, he worried that after a “few more years of egalitarian and redistributionist rhetoric, a few hundred more ‘entitlements,’ ” and a few more efforts to achieve “equal rations, equal housing, equal social esteem, equal strength and beauty,” no one would know “when the final line between a relatively free order and a collectivist servitude has been crossed.” Nozick, in “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” a libertarian rejoinder to his Harvard colleague John Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice,” developed what he called an “entitlement theory of justice.” To oversimplify: according to Nozick, the only things a person is legitimately entitled to are things he creates by “mixing” his own labor with something that no one else possesses, such as unclaimed land or resources, and things thus created which the person acquires through exchange or as gifts. But it is unjust for things—things like public schools and pensions—to be acquired through redistributive taxation, which is morally “on a par with forced labor.” In other words, what no one is entitled to is, precisely, “entitlements.” The term becomes a contranym—a word with two opposite meanings, like “oversight” or “sanction.” And this one carries more than a hint of sarcasm.

The first official use of “entitlements” in its current sense came during the Nixon Administration, when the 1974 budget act defined it as “payments to persons or governments who meet the requirements established by laws.” But it didn’t rise from the wonky mire until 1982, when, as John H. Makin and Norman J. Ornstein note, in their 1994 book, “Debt and Taxes,” President Reagan, who had always referred to government programs for the old, the sick, and the poor as the “Social Security net,” renamed them “entitlements,” in a speech to a Jaycee convention. The business press quickly followed suit. “Later in the year, other magazines also used the term,” Makin and Ornstein write. “Most of the publications put the word in quotes the first time it was used, indicating its novelty, but not thereafter.”

Thereafter is where we’ve been ever since. “Entitlements” went from nowhere to everywhere in record time. The Washington Post mentioned “entitlements” or “entitlement programs” in the same article as “Social Security” just five times in 1979. In 1982 it happened a hundred and eighteen times. During the nineteen-nineties, the number topped eight hundred. If the current rate holds steady for the rest of this decade, the Post will have racked up seventeen hundred by the end of 2019.

The word “entitle” appears in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence (just as another dread word, “welfare,” appears in the first sentence of the Constitution), but the present-day uses of its derivatives are, to put it mildly, problematic. A so-called entitlement is a benefit extended to those who meet the lawful requirements, without the need for a specific appropriation. (Under this definition, by the way, a hedge-fund manager’s low tax rate fills the bill as snugly as Grandma’s Social Security check.) But “acting entitled” or having “a sense of entitlement” is something no one yearns to be accused of. Just ask Donald Trump, Justin Bieber, and the Kardashians if it makes them feel flattered.

Perhaps President Reagan chose to call the public services he disliked by a new name simply for convenience. “Entitlements” is a syllable shorter than “social insurance.” That saves time, and time is money. But Reagan’s would-be heirs may have other motives. In the runup to last year’s election, the Fox Business Web site devoted a week to “Entitlement Nation: Makers vs. Takers.” Mitt Romney denounced President Obama as the avatar of a dystopian “Entitlement Society.” And, in his most memorable speech, Romney accused the “forty-seven per cent” of Americans who supposedly “believe that they are victims” of also believing “that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it—that that’s an entitlement, and the government should give it to them.”

Nobody forced liberals, and everybody in between, to go along with a usage that Daniel Patrick Moynihan once called “semantic infiltration.” President Obama, in his inaugural address, did not let the word “entitlements” pass his lips. Instead, he spoke of Medicare and Social Security, which, he said, “do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make our country great.” Yet he, like too many other Democrats, was soon back to talking about “entitlements.” Next week, he presents his budget proposals to Congress—a fit occasion for him, and his party, to start watching their language. ♦