Life & Wisdom Quote by Octavio Paz

Paz is smuggling a revolution into a copy editor's toolkit. By insisting that social criticism "begins with grammar", he frames politics not as a clash of parties but as a fight over the basic operating system of thought: the rules that decide who can be a subject, who gets cast as an object, what counts as action, and what gets treated as natural background. Grammar is where power hides in plain sight, in passive voice that magically erases agents ("mistakes were made"), in euphemisms that launder brutality into procedure, in the tidy abstractions that turn people into "units", "flows", "cases."

"The re-establishing of meanings" raises the stakes: Paz isn't advocating mere semantic nitpicking, he's describing a rescue mission. Meanings get kidnapped by propaganda, bureaucracy, and even well-meaning slogans until words become exhausted shells. When that happens, critique can't land because the target keeps slipping into fog. To re-establish meaning is to restore friction between words and reality, to insist that language once again names what it does: exploitation, censorship, hunger, complicity.

Coming from a poet, this isn't quaint idealism. It's a reminder that poetry's job, at its most civic, is to detoxify language: to make it strange enough that we can see it again, precise enough that we can argue honestly, musical enough that it can travel. Paz, writing in a 20th century Latin American landscape of ideological theater and state violence, understood that regimes don't just control streets; they control dictionaries. Criticism starts by taking the dictionary back.