Feb 11, 2016 3 min read

English is not a static language. New words come into it every day as old words fall out of it. What we say today – and how we say it – is much different than the language spoken a century ago.

There is no sense in resisting this kind of change, but there is good reason to put up a fight when perfectly good words are made meaningless by misuse and overuse.

We mourn the death of unique. It once meant “one of a kind” or “the only one.” Now you might hear about a smartphone being unique, even though there are probably 200 million exactly like it on the planet. Unique has replaced unusual, which has been tossed in history’s dust bin.

Icon is another word that has lost meaning. Young people cannot be blamed for thinking that an icon is a celebrity. But an icon is a religious subject painted on a wooden panel, and more broadly, an object of uncritical devotion. The continued abuse of this word blurs the necessary distinction between Michael the Archangel and Michael Jackson.

One of the latest words to be pulverized in the verbal processor is unprecedented.

The pop singer Beyonce performed at Sunday’s Super Bowl, wearing a sexy leather dominatrix outfit and singing a song that, if one could actually hear the lyrics, delivered a message about racism and police brutality.

“This is an unprecedented moment in popular music culture,” said Daphne Brooks, professor in the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, on “CBS This Morning” Tuesday. “Never before have we seen a pop icon, especially an African American woman, use her platform as a musician, as a celebrity, in order to make some of the boldest, most ferocious, most inspiring political statements about the Black Freedom struggle.”

Unprecedented means “without precedent”; in other words, it has never, ever happened before.

The professor must have a very short memory. Political statements, particularly about injustice and inequality, have been an important part of popular music culture since almost everyone reading this page has been alive. Protest against social injustice was what fueled the folk music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, to name just a few. The Beatles, U2, Sinead O’Connor, Todd Rundgren, the Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen and so many more musical performers have used their platforms of celebrity to espouse their political views.

What is really disturbing is Professor Brooks ignores the precedent of so many black female singers who championed the “Black Freedom struggle” before Beyonce was even born.

How could she overlook Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit,” about the lynching of blacks in the Deep South? Or Mahalia Jackson’s performance at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. The voices of Miriam Makeba and Aretha Franklin were inspiration for so many in the Civil Rights movement. And the boldest and most ferocious of them all might have been Nina Simone, who risked her career to fight racial prejudice.

What Beyonce does on stage is entertaining, perhaps inspiring. But what she sings about is hardly without precedent.