Pretty scary, right?
But I cherry-picked that. The full etymology bounces through Old French and Middle English and takes a few turns that have nothing to do with subservience. But I built a narrative around it. Same trick. Different direction.
Again…
A musician is someone who practices the art of the Muses… the Greek goddesses who governed not just art, but memory, knowledge, and cosmic harmony. So, every time you pick up a guitar or sit behind a drum kit, you’re channeling divine intelligence that the ancient world believed held the universe together.
Feeling important yet?
Now flip it. The word audience comes from the Latin audire… to obey. Not to listen. To obey. Every crowd that ever watched you play wasn’t there to enjoy your music… they were there to submit to it. You’re not an entertainer. You’re a commander. And they didn’t even know they were following orders.
Ridiculous, but sounded true for a second, right? A second is all the trick needs.
Here’s where it’s truly dangerous.
I was a cop for thirteen years and learned quickly that words are weapons. Not in the poetic sense. In the operational sense.
In my deep cover world, language was survival. The wrong word at the wrong time didn’t get you a bad Yelp review. It got you whacked.
But even in everyday policing outside the gang world, I watched language shape reality in real time. A suspect is someone you suspect. That’s it. But the moment that word enters a report, a conversation, a courtroom, it carries weight that the person hasn’t earned yet. Because we want to believe that we caught the criminal. The word does half the prosecutor’s job before the trial even starts.
And on the flip side, a witness comes from the Old English wit, meaning knowledge. A witness is literally “one who knows.” But we all know that eyewitness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of evidence in the justice system. The word promises certainty. The science says otherwise.
Words are not truth. They are frames. And whoever builds the frame gets to decide what you see… as long as you want to look.
So, here’s the question.
If I can take the word sergeant and make it sound like servant leadership… and someone else can take the word government and make it sound like mind control… and we’re both technically pulling from real Latin roots…
Who’s right?
Neither of us.
Both of us.
That’s the trick.
But check this out: The trick only works because we let it.
George Bernard Shaw nailed this: “The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it and become blind to all the arguments against it.”
We don’t stumble into these videos as blank slates. We walk in carrying a bias… a suspicion… sometimes even a hope that there’s a hidden answer to why life feels so heavy. And the moment someone offers one, we stop thinking and start confirming. We chop up words, rearrange roots, and transform meanings until they fit the narrative we were already writing in our heads before we ever pressed play.
It’s human nature, not conspiracy.
English is a Frankenstein language. It’s got Germanic bones, Latin muscles, French skin, Greek nerves, and a few Norse ligaments holding it all together. You can reach into that pile and pull out whatever meaning you want, the same way you can reach into a chord and pull out a major or minor, depending on which note you emphasize.
The note didn’t change. Your emphasis did.
I’m not telling you language doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. I’ve seen it save lives and end them. I’ve used it to build trust with people who wanted to kill me, and I’ve watched it destroy trust between people who loved each other.
But language isn’t a spell. It’s a tool. And like any tool, it does what the hand holding it decides.
So, the next time someone shows you a video that explains how the alphabet is designed as a cage, or how certain words enslave your subconscious, ask yourself two questions:
Who built this frame… and what do I want to see?
—
Tegan Broadwater spent 13 years with the Fort Worth Police Department, including two years assigned to the FBI working deep undercover inside a violent Crip organization. That operation, detailed in his book Life in the Fishbowl, resulted in 51 convictions. He has since founded Tactical Systems Network, an armed security & protection firm primarily staffed by veterans, is a creative writer and musician, and hosts The Tegan Broadwater Podcast. All book profits benefit children of incarcerated parents. Learn more at TeganBroadwater.com
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