Mar-a-Lago raid made ‘espionage’ the word of the moment

A bunch of folks were annoyedly distressed when they went to their dictionaries this week — and not just because they learned the Oxford English Dictionary had newly added entries for folx (the world’s dumbest intentional misspelling) and annoyedly (which should have been there already).

After the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, lookups for espionage surged. But when dictionary fans got there, they were doubtlessly disappointed by Merriam-Webster’s definition: “the practice of spying or using spies to obtain information about the plans and activities especially of a foreign government or a competing company.”

Huh?

Until we get evidence that Donald Trump is an actual Russian spy, that definition doesn’t seem too applicable to what the Justice Department was searching for.

» READ MORE: As the FBI raids his home, Trump turns to a familiar playbook to divide America

The lookup surge is logical: The unsealed search warrant for Mar-a-Lago revealed that the FBI’s investigation was into Trump’s possible violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and espionage is — in 2022, anyway — an uncommon enough word that the OED characterizes its usage as tending “to be restricted to literate vocabulary associated with educated discourse,” its frequency being on par with words like surveillance, assimilation, and tumult.

The word wasn’t always so obscure. Though it dates to the late 18th century, espionage has had (until this week, anyway) two distinct peaks in popularity: during World War I, when the Espionage Act passed, and as World War II segued into the early years of the Cold War. The law most famously felled Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

But in its early years, much of the Espionage Act’s goal was not spying but union-busting. Less than three months after the bill passed in 1917, the Justice Department raided every American office of the Industrial Workers of the World in a 24-hour span, an action that no less an authority than the U.S. attorney for Philadelphia said at the time was “very largely to put the I.W.W. out of business.”

“In its early years, much of the Espionage Act’s goal was not spying but union-busting.”

You can bet that the Wobblies rushing to their dictionaries to find out why the FBI was ransacking their offices were just as confused as Trump, whose shape-shifting explanations for the classified files at his house were even wobblier.

The section of the Espionage Act ostensibly relating to Trump says that even if you have “lawful possession or control of any document … relating to the national defense,” you can go to prison for up to 10 years if you “through gross negligence [permit it] to be removed from its proper place of custody.” In other words, you don’t have to be the Rosenbergs to be in legal jeopardy, and the dictionary definition of espionage is only tangentially related.

Our country has a proud tradition of naming bills after the things we want them to be about, not necessarily what they are about. It helps sell them. (See also: The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which miiiight help reduce inflation, but is really all about climate change, health care, and taxes. Or the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2021, which bans transgender athletes from competing and, if it actually became law, would harm women and girls both in and out of sports.)

The fact that the dictionary definition of espionage, which many people all of a sudden wanted to learn about, doesn’t square with the circumstances surrounding the boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago is a problem, though. Because in that gap, Trump and others can more easily backfill with ever-changing excuses for his behavior.

And if recent history is any guide, those excuses will be filled with misspellings of their own — intentional or not — that make folx look downright Shakespearean.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and catachresis to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.